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

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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.

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Hello, welcome to cookie issues. This is Dave Arnold, your host of cookie issues coming to you live on the heritage Radio Network every Tuesday from whenever to whenever we're actually closer now that don't have to go anywhere. I'm coming to you from the Lower East Side of Manhattan. We have with usual Anastasia the hammer Lopez from an undisclosed new location no longer in Topanga out there in Southern California. Hi do Anastasia okay. We have John in actually in a booth somewhere in new lab in Brooklyn. How you doing John? Doing? Oh, thank you and it was your birthday yesterday.

Happy birthday.

Thank you. 33

Yeah, what do you what do you make?

I'd like a Benihana birthday kind of theme going on. So some friends and I we ordered some a five wagyu steak did some fried rice and like the you know, Iceberg lettuce salad with a ginger carrot dressing did some dipping sauces all that stuff. It was a it was good. With a lot a lot of steak really like too much steak actually.

Well, thank you. Well, I mean, you didn't do any flair work though. You didn't do any knife flair work, right?

No, no, no, just straightforward and simple and want to get too fancy.

I told you yesterday that I'm petrified that DAX will learn this because he has it. He flips everything anyway, it's like a it's like some sort of like a tic that he has everything in his hands gets flipped. And so when he goes into the kitchen, he starts flipping. He's like, I'm not flipping. I'm like I'm watching you flip it in your hand. So like, you know if you saw Benihana chef he would he would it would be a game over. My mom. Well,

does he play tennis? Did you get him into racket sports?

It's a great flipping mat. We live in New York City like you know, yeah. So like the but my mom back when she was an intern and in an ER before she went into pediatrics saw a beanie baby. Hi Have a trainee come in with a severed finger. Amazing, right? Well, yeah, yeah, straw. got Matt in his Rhode Island Hidey ho How you doing? Doing great. Yeah, but today we have it's the second week in a row right? Wasn't Harold last week? Yeah, yeah. Special guests. With their new their first book we have Peter Sorenson. How do you? Is it Sorensen are surgeons and how do the Swedes pronounce that? Oh, with new MLA,

the Swedish would would say so I'm sorry. But but I'm quite used to Sorenson now, so that's fine, too.

Yeah. And what's your current title at the Harvard but

Well, I have one of these wonderful, long Harvard titles that are that don't mean anything outside of Harvard. I'm a senior preceptor. Recycle Engineering and Applied Materials. Yes. It's a faculty position is a teaching faculty position with with voting rights and Pa rights. Yeah. Also means nothing to anyone outside of Harvard. Yeah. Yeah,

I mean, Preceptors are pretty cool title. I think everyone would like to be a preceptor of something I don't even like it sounds like you're going to hit someone over the head.

Like it's like it's like a class and Dungeons and Dragons or something. Yeah. Like I'm a level 50

Preceptor. Well. Now you sound like a Scientologist.

That's true somewhere.

Yeah. All right. Nice. And Professor David waits, also of the Harvard how're you doing? Good day very, you doing well, now? Now what's now? Okay, so, long story short. Here's what happened. So, Michael Brenner, who couldn't be on with us today. Pa David weights they have this class they've been teaching at Harvard for the past. I think it's Is this the 11th or 10th? year right now? 10th. This is the this the 11th year 11th year, so when teaching 11 years, they started out with a foreign age basically, like foreign. And Harvard got together because fram was interested in micro fluidics. Right? Which is one of your specialities professor.

Yeah, something like that. Not quite, but it's close enough. Yeah.

And they decided to do a science and cooking course. And kind of the rest is history, you guys. And for the 10th anniversary, they started last year working on a book which has just come out called Science and cooking, which is ostensibly what we're here to talk about today. But you guys want to talk about the course for a minute first.

Sure. It started actually, when Ron came and gave a talk at Harvard about science and cooking. I never thought a chef would be interested in science, but he was. And so for Ron and and Michael and I, we started talking and what can we do together? I mean, you know, I'm a physicist. You don't have rock stars. In physics, you don't have chefs who attract huge audiences and find Fineman, not even Fineman, not not not like frog. But anyways, we started a class on cooking. And using cooking, I view it as using cooking to teach non scientists How to Appreciate science having an excuse to learn science, because they can study cooking. But I think it's become even more than that. And Pierre joined us the next year and really added an enormous amount to the class. And has been going ever since. We bring famous chefs in every week. And they give a lecture about cooking. And then we try and give a lecture about the science behind it that for the second lecture of the week.

And for the past, I don't know like nine or ever since I think the second year you've had Harold McGee, or Harold McGee was been there every year. But you had actually, every year except for this year, we skipped one episode of Cooking issues, because your class is always on Tuesdays roughly around the time of when I would have to be doing this or at least it was so yeah, so like, I've been going for the past I don't know how many number of years doing the initial lecture. And I don't know it seems to be going pretty well. You're still guys are still going strong, right?

Yeah, that's great. And I'm really glad that you come David you add so much to the class a certain soussan

Craziness. Yeah,

I learned so much.

I learned yes you and you and Harold are always really kick starting this semester with all these you all of your amazing demos. It's just it's speeded through our of demos but but I have to say I'm sorry to all I didn't realize that you are not giving cooking issues on those days. I feel like I should take this opportunity when I'm here to apologize to your audience. That's too bad.

It's a It's honestly it's in their best interest to have one fewer cooking issues to listen to Um, but the so this year was the first year that we had to do it remotely. And so I didn't have kind of the my normal, you know, normally what happens is there's like an awesome at Harvard they have in the Science Center, they have this kind of awesome back of house. And they have these kind of, like, amazing demo stations. And they have a guy named Daniel Rosenberg, who does all he has like access to amazing demonstrations, you thank him in the book. And it's just really, really fun to do demonstrations at Harvard. And you know, because of this amazing back of house they have with kind of really cool equipment, including all the standard physics demos, like shoot the monkey and it what are the other like big classic ones I shoot the monkey is only one I can remember by name, but zillions of classic demonstrations, right. And so this is the first year I've had to, you know, work without that, kind of without that resource. And so I used my son, Dax, to do some to do some tests. And I hear a PA, you were telling me that, like, the students were actually nervous that I was physically damaging DAX during the, during the demonstration.

Yeah, there was a great demo, this was, this was the classic demo of having a water bath at 60 degrees Celsius and having an oil bath at 60 degrees Celsius, and then sticking your hand in. And the students were watching as Dave ordered DAX to put his hands in and we're very quickly withdrawing his hands and look at having a very painful look on his face.

And oil everywhere. Oil everywhere, anyway. And then like, you know, of course, like I'm not in like normal, Iowa or whatever. So people, people are like, getting ready to call Child Services on me, I think because I made them put it I was like, put it back in again, do it again. And then I like took out a Sears all and I was Sears falling over his hand and making him Is it was a thing people, you know, checks out, though, write checks out. Alright, so you guys want to talk about what?

Well, so I was gonna just do to give listeners a sense of what it's like when when you and health come to visit. So for starters, we're always just a little bit scared. Because you do this, you you show up in the beginning of the semester when we talk about energy, temperature and heat. And so you do this beautiful demo where you line up all the stupid eggs at different temperatures. And then you you open them and you're basically you're you're sort of friends with the eggs, you look at an egg and you're like this one is at 62.5. And it should be at 63. And and our team is responsible for for making sure these eggs are there for you. And it's always a little bit scary, because we know that even if we're off by half a degree, you're gonna catch us.

Yeah, yeah. Yeah. And for those of you that don't know, like, it's kind of it's difficult to put one of these kind of things together when one of these kind of large demo things very difficult. And to get kind of all the moving parts together. And like anything can throw that demo off. Like if you over refrigerate an egg yolk, it can it can go, you know, you can you can cause it to be kind of prematurely hard. It's kind of it's a kind of a nightmare. And so I'm sure also if you're not used to dealing with me, I mean, those of you I mean, all of you have dealt with me before, so if you're not used to dealing with me, I'm told that I can make people nervous. I don't really understand why. But apparently, like, I think people think I'm angry when I'm not. Or maybe I don't know what the Stasi What do you think you you comment this to me all the time that I'm like this.

You're an incredibly difficult person to work with. Yeah, but like, why? Because you aren't flexible. You are opinionated. You usually lash out at people be lash out. Or when things aren't done right. You usually lash out

Why Don't lash out at people I lash out maybe a people like in my I don't lash out at people who aren't in my immediate circle.

Yeah, but I think that scares people when they see you yelling at me or somebody in your immediate circle. You know,

I always assume that people who aren't in my immediate circle are going to get stuff wrong. Because why would they know how to get it right if they haven't done it before? You know, I mean, yeah. Yeah, but it's a good it's a good I see that you have a version of that in the science and cooking books. You guys want to talk about the book?

Sure. Do it?

Well, which you provided a recipe for by the way we saw the very end of the book when we celebrate that we're all done. it, there is a recipe from you say this your, your amazing Thai basil Daiquiri.

And now at the at the beginning of when we used to do this a little bit long time ago, we tried to get around the whole, I mean, that's the problem with colleges here in the US, they're so worried about alcohol that it's like, it was hard for me to do any kind of alcohol based demos, but we did a couple of times do them in the evening lectures, right. And then even even they became kind of a pain in the butt about that, right. But it was nice to include the Thai basil Daiquiri. And I also noticed that you have, so most of the stuff that I deal with, with, you know, with you guys is at the beginning, where you know, you're talking mainly about kind of physical things, heat, phase changes, and whatnot. But I noticed that you also get a lot into kind of other transformations in the book, which wouldn't normally I think fit into the general rubric of a physics class, like transformations due to enzymes, transformations due to fermentations, and things like that. So how are you working that stuff into into a class? It's basically on a physically?

That's a good question, I think, really, the way we are, are explaining the science is is inspired by the, the, by the recipes, and by the dishes that the chefs bring to the table. So so just to give people a little bit of background, the way our class is structured is that every week a famous chef comes and talks about what they do their work from their perspective. And we then use that as a way to teach science to inspire discussion about what is going on in the food, and why are their dishes so successful? Why do they work? Right? The reason that recipes work is not a sort of random accident, it's, it's grounded in scientific fact. And we can understand why they work by sort of asking the right questions and, and trying to figure out what's what's going on, on a deeper level. And I think when you do that, you realize that what's going on in food is not only physics, it's also chemistry, and it's biology. And, and it what we've done in the course, and what we're doing in the book is boiling it down to core concepts that kind of describe recipes, even recipes that are very different, like completely different recipes, like steak and fried ice cream, you know, very, very different foods, but they can be explained by the same scientific concept that is underlying them. And that is making them work. And by by kind of collecting these concepts, it just so happens that some of them are soft matter physics concepts, which is Dave's specialty, and some of them fall within chemistry and biology, which is, which is my, my focus.

Right. And so like, just to give people an idea, like you'll, you'll have something on, like emulsions, and you'll you'll put out like a standard man, student standard mayonnaise recipe and talk about it right. And then on the other hand, you'll have a, you know, a recipe from marguerites, where, you know, you have to inoculate, you know, a crab apple with a rhizopus. And, and, you know, incubate it. And so it's like, it's like, or you'll have a recipe that requires a rotary evaporator, they do like a, an alkyl, or can Roco, one of jordiz recipes, or, you know, you'll so it's like all it's all over the map in terms of like what skill level and equipment level is, is needed. Because the idea is to kind of show off this kind of interesting dynamic, you create an A class between kind of things that your students can do. And then like the crazy stuff that these chefs are doing some crazy, some not. But the recipes that you gave are the actual recipes that they would use in the restaurant. So it's like, well, you need liquid nitrogen to do it. You know what I mean? It's kind of so it's kind of interesting. It's kind of interesting mix when you say,

right, yeah, it really is. And I think that that's the that's goes back to what I was saying before of how it can be the same scientific concepts that are uniting, say, mac and cheese with, you know, manipulating the viscosity of sauces in a very hot cusine setting. And so it we can, we can think about it and ask questions about it. Whether it's a very, very fancy dish or whether it's just you know, the toast you had for breakfast.

I know Dave, if I could just interject, yeah, slightly different perspective. She has a great teacher and knows all these things, and she's fantastic. And that's why it's great to teach with her man. Just as a physicist, and what I like about it is the kind of physics that I do if I tried to teach a freshman physics course, which this is the level of freshman physics course, if I tried to teach a freshman physics course, on the physics that I do, my colleagues would laugh me out of the department, they say, You can't do that, because you're not teaching Newton's laws and Maxwell's equations, and all this, blah, blah, blah, which really, most people never really need to know if they want to understand the world around them. And I sort of feel that we teach the kind of physics you need to know to understand the world around you, because that's the kind of physics that I do. And so to me, that class really is a science class, first and foremost, that the curriculum is science. And we're just really fortunate that these fantastic chefs like yourself, or like Harold, or like all the other people from Jose, all these people come, and they teach us about cooking, but we can find what we need, from the recipes. And from the food and from the taste. And from the way it's plated, we can find everything we need to get the scientific concepts to teach the scientific concepts. So you know, you talk about mayonnaise, while we can teach what the motion really is. And we can ask, why is it solid? If it's just two liquids, you mix them together? Why does it turn into a solid? You take foam, it's liquid and a gas, how do you make it was solid, so you get whipped cream, we can teach all these simple concepts by referring to them, referring them to the culinary aspects. So to me, it's still a science class, and everything you talk about is just looking at the science. And it's really part and parcel of the the kind of science that I think is actually important to teach people, it's the the most useful kind of physics that you need.

Yeah, and actually, I would add to that something that we've talked a lot about this semester, which is that so many of the concepts and cooking are also concepts, scientific concepts that occur outside of cooking. So one of one of the things we did during the week when we discussed food fermentations is we showed two curves. One of them was the growth of microbes in sauerkraut, and the other one was the growth of COVID cases in New York City in March. And of course, they're both exponential growth. And so by understanding exponential growth, in in the context of sauerkraut, you can kind of understand it in the concept in the context of all kinds of other issues in the world around us.

So you're saying we're all just like a big packed thing of sauerkraut here. And I'm getting out of that. So you guys want to talk about actually what soft matter physics is, because it's not, I don't think a generally known term among non science people.

Like you can define it in a simple way. Let's see, I always like to say, if you're sitting on a chair with some hand rests, or the back of your chair, bought a new chair, if you try and take something or the table in front of you, if you take it and you grab it, and you try and bend it, is try that, or wait while you do it, I bet you won't be able to bend it, I bet you won't be able to make it move. And they say well pinch yourself. And you'll say ouch, you can feel that you can bend yourself, you can pinch yourself pretty easily. And that's the difference between something that's soft, you are in something, it's hard. And you know, as people, we interact mainly with soft things, we don't like to bang into hard things. And a lot of things are close, everything we around us are soft, and soft matters, really studying the general principles of why things are soft, what the, what the consequences of that is compared to why things are hard. And there's some very, very simple rules that make something soft and make something hard. And then once you start thinking about it, everything is very different. The behavior is very different than than the rest of the, the world around you. And to me, most things that we interact with that are important to us are somehow related to soft matter. And so we better really understand that. Just as if we were going to understand the more traditional kind of physics.

Why do you think it's I mean, maybe I'm wrong in assuming this, but it seems like it's among, you know, studies relatively recently blossoming, right. Yes. Why?

It's because it's not traditional. It's not you can't you can you it helps to have the traditional kind of physics as a back Round. But you need so much more of a background, you need so many other things. And it's just a recognition that there's really interesting physical properties that maybe we've ignored. Because physicists have been so enamored with the idea of quantum mechanics and things like that, which, of course, your beautiful science and beautiful, very important, but really don't impact our lives as much as just what is around us. I always say, you know, Dave, I always say that, you know, a lot of these people might be my doctors when I get really old and decrepit. A lot of my students and I rather that they understand something about blood flow, about viscosity about the elastic properties of something like me, compared to the more traditional physics, which is like how 2 billion bar balls bounce against one another something how something is quantum mechanical? No, that's not really important for understanding what's really relevant to the world around us. And so are like us matters the world around us

is part of it are the models more difficult to simplify such that it required like better computational basis before it could become a real, like kind of blossomed big field,

I would say that the the, the models are not as precise. Like I can calculate exactly how to billiard balls bounce against one another, provided, of course, I ignore all the realities of the world like friction and the effects of air and a little water and things like that. But I can calculate it very precisely using some very simple, beautiful equations. Whereas the equations that we use in soft matter are maybe more approximations. They're, they give you just as good an answer, but it's not as precise. And it's, you have to think much more broadly, you have to think about, it's better to understand some physical concepts and accept the fact that you don't get absolutely precise calculations, but you get calculations that are good enough to tell you what's going on.

We had a question about the book in from our friend, Sonny Dee. Who says, Who is the book for? In other words, like, who did you write it for? How does and this is important, because you can also take this class online, even if you're not a Harvard student? Or at least you could I'm assuming it's still available? Who is his book for? How does one access the recorded lectures as well as the course online?

Okay, I think the book is for any, anyone who is curious about the science that that goes on in food. And it is, I would, I would not say that it's a book for people with tons of science background, it's, it's really for a non scientist. Audience, I could have met. And I also think there are bits and pieces here and there that we have two equations in the book. Whereas in the class, we have, we have many more equations, but the concepts of the equations are still there, and, and the beautiful recipes are there. So So I think for anyone who is sort of curious about the science of food, ranging from younger people, to older people, to teachers, I think we'll get something out of the book. And I also think it's a book for people who just want to be awed by some of the beauty of the recipes from the chef's, the chefs who have contributed are, I think you could argue that the greatest culinary minds of our of our times, and some of the creations are, are some of the greatest culinary creations of our times, and they're in there. And you can kind of think about the science with us as we walk through it. So that's it for the first question, the second question. So yes, the you can take this class online, on edX, the edX platform, and I think the easiest way to find it is probably to Google edX in science and cooking. And there are two courses. One is called physics and when is called chemistry and they're, they're kind of the kind of the, they're one big course together. All of our basically all of our information is on our website called Science, cooking one word.cs.harvard.edu. And there are links there to our YouTube channels. There are links to our social media and so on. We do record the public lectures that happen every Monday night. Just this past week we had a week if unburden the week before that we had Jose Andres. And next week is Maya Warren. She's going to talk about the science of ice cream. All of this is on our website. So Google science cooking.cs@harvard.edu, and you should find it

Cool and Pavel Pawlowski wrote in. And I know you deal with this in the book for for several reasons but you talk about pH shifts and alkalinity and I believe actually you even got called out yet you're a lover of lutefisk or you just happen to be called out because you're skinny.

I have a love hate relationship with with lutefisk I really did not like it at all as a child it for those of you who have headed it's sort of fish that has the consistency of fish jelly. But usually the condiments are really delicious. And I did love that as a kid I love the potatoes and the peas and in my part of Sweden, you eat it with mustard sauce. And there's, you know, disagreements about what the best condiments are. But the fish itself is, is has a very different consistency, which I think freaked me out as a child. And now I Well, it's interesting.

So for those of you that don't know, like lutefisk is treat treated with an alkaline a, like the protein gets wickedly broken down it turns kind of translucent and kind of jelly like and it has a specific texture and aroma, correct?

Yes, it has an aroma that is quite strong. And the texture is very it's very special. It's it's this kind of jelly. It's sort of like if swollen jelly like a piece of fish and you make it with a white fish. So it's kind of this, like a cod or laying. So So it's sort of this white blob.

Yeah, it really, really selling it by the way. Yeah, white blank. The reason I bring that up is because what Pablo was asking is what other alkaline cooking methods are there besides next embolization, which is of course treating corn, although, you know, we treat other things as well now, without going to, you know, change the structure of grains so that you can turn them into things like tortillas. But what other outcome cooking methods are there besides the customization? And what does alkalinity do to foods in general? If you want to take

a great question. Well, I I like that you you kind of answered the question by mentioning a little bit score a lot of fish. I think other ones are the 100 year old egg, which is raw eggs incubated for a long time and assault and sometimes alkaline solution, which really changes the texture and the color of the egg, it turns this translucent brown and the yolk goes from being yellow to green, blue. That's another example. Let's see. But it's really an example of cooking with with charge in a way I mean cooking savich is kind of the same thing but opposite that's cooking with acidity. So when you cook with with alkalinity and of course in the context of externalization you're not only cooking with alkalinity, you're also usually having calcium ions present which are charged ions that that will also sort of mess with the net charge on proteins and denature them and and the hydroxide ions will sort of partly break them down and change change the texture.

In the book you also do the Modernist Cuisine recipe where they they shift Alkalyn in pressure cooker for the kind of boosting of my yard and Browning reactions at lower temperatures when you shift out a bunch of things happen when you shift the pH like a bunch, right? I mean there's texture effects. There's taste effects. There's I mean, it's just yeah, did you ever did we ever in the class do the translucent the translucent eggs like the not the not actual 100 year olds that translucent duck and chicken eggs with the with the live treatment?

I don't think if we did it with you we did a lot of x with you but I don't think we did those.

This episode brought to you by appeal here at Hrn. We care about reducing waste across our food system from farms to home kitchens, we know that about half of the produce we grow ends up in the trash. We all want to enjoy produce at peak freshness and reduce the amount that gets thrown away. That's where appeal comes in. Appeal is a plant based protective layer that helps produce lasts up to twice as long. It's edible, invisible and imitates how appeals naturally protect fruits and vegetables. Because here's the thing less waste doesn't just mean you were throwing less food away. It also means we throw away less water, energy and other resources that go into growing produce. Appeal works with nature to reduce waste across the food system from the farm to the kitchen appeal helps us to conserve our precious resources to ensure that we have fresh food to meet our growing needs. appeal fudong Good learn more@appeal.com For Scandinavian questions Do you ever hang out with your Norwegian cousins or no? Me? Not actual cousins? You know what I mean? Like, like, country cousins.

I like Norwegians. All right. I don't see them a lot. Okay.

All right. So like, do you have an idea? How do you pronounce the brown cheese? Is it yay, toast? How you pronounce it?

I would say yes, toast, but I'm sure that's a sweet suffocation.

Do they have that a similar product in Sweden?

They may in northern Sweden. I'm from the south.

Yeah, you're you're from Scotland, right? Yeah. Yeah. So the that's where Absolut Vodka is made. Correct. You ever go to their distillery? I haven't been I should go. There's like three people in the whole place. It's like one giant machine that produces all the Absolut Vodka with like, like, quite, maybe there's 10 people in there. Like when a tour group shows up it like more than doubles, the number of people that are there. And then they have a like, everything is trucked around. And then they have like a warehouse, which is kind of like this amazing. Indiana Jones warehouse with a machine that can pick up and put whole pallets in. And everything is it's it's it's bananas, you should check it out next time you're back home. But do you like this? So this, I mentioned how this is the only cheese that I've never really wrap my head around liking is this is this kind of brown whey cheese from Scandinavia. And so people have been writing in things and so I'm just gonna, like, let you comment. Do you like this kind of product? Or no,

I'm kind of both. It's an acquired taste. It has a sort of sweet, slightly, almost caramelized flavor. Do you agree? Do you like it?

No, I gotta give it another chance. It was one of those things where like, it's like, you know how well you know good. But John said a couple of weeks ago they had a really bad experience with whiskey when he was like a you know a kid. What were you drinking? Jack Daniels and eating? What?

What was it? Getting us in a hot tub?

Oh, geez. Hot Tub Spaghettios and Jack Daniels nightmare which has turned him off of both Spaghettios and Jack Daniels, presumably for the rest of his life, at least. You know, from the time he was a teenager until he's 33. So like, we don't know if it'll ever wear off. But it hasn't worn off yet. Right? Yeah, exactly. Yeah. And so like I had a similar reaction to the gatos when I was a kid, where I took a giant chunk of it put the thing in my mouth was like it's about cheeses are cherries, and then that was it like, um, I guess I was ruined. But we had a 91 Alex wrote in from Norway. So I thought I'd mention it since you know, Scandinavian day today. At the bar. I work we put it on reindeer burgers with sour cream and lingonberry. But they put it on after it's taken off the heat so it doesn't melt, which would make it Prim, which I don't even know. He says that's the soft cheese version. And it's also traditionally used to make a sauce for reindeer. What do you think?

That sounds great.

Are you a fan of reindeer burgers? reindeer meat?

I do like it a lot. Yeah, it is a very special sort of wild flavor.

So what's the what's the difference in the flavor of reindeer meat from other meats?

Um, well, it's been a while now. But I find that it has this sort of rich sort of wild meat flavor. And then of course, it's it's often the way I've had it is often sort of dried and, and smoked as well. And then these these flavors kind of come out even more.

And when I had it up north in Sweden, it was just viciously viciously overcooked. So it's kind of hard for me to kind of know, to know what it was and John C chord wrote in. And by the way, Alex also wants to know how to make some more red hot poker recipes for the Red Hot Ale, but I'm not exactly sure what your question is. So please send it back in and I'll do it. And John C chord wanted us to know and I haven't had chance to look it up yet, but apparently there was a major cheesed Bruno's tunnel fire in Norway in 2013. Are you familiar with this PA? Big Big Cheese?

Mr.

Yeah, I'm sure I'm gonna look it up. As soon as I'm off the air today, I'm gonna go look up the cheese tunnel fire. And I'm going to ask you guys a random question about academic books. So I remember reading academic books before everyone only read academic books on the internet. And then I've been doing some research for my next book. And if you guys noticed that chapter books are really really terrible now because everyone assumes that you're just going to download individual chapters. And so every chapter of a book has to start with the same stupid introduction of potato is the fourth most grown thing if I had been reading potato stuff, like left right and center now for the past. couple of days. And the way that these books now work every each every chapter has to have that same dumb intro. A donkey is an animal with four feet. We know just talk about the interesting part of the donkeys Have you guys noticed this in academic publications?

I don't violence.

I don't read books that often. Books. When I read them, I have nice copies. I'm old fashioned. You know, I go to my bookshelf, I take them out of my bookshelf. So I'm not the right person that to ask Dave I'm too old fashioned. I feel like book books. Yeah, well,

me too. But they're so expensive. Who could buy these things? You know, and I don't have the Harvard Library to buy them for me, you know, so I have to read them. And that the thing is, is that I guess the other thing is, is that someone who's just starting, they have to read all the review books, right? So someone's like, I'm going to come out with a book on potatoes. And so like, you know, they get an editor. And then that editor, like look, goes and gets all the potato experts. And each potato expert puts a chapter in, right? And then they're all kind of agglomerated into this quote, unquote, book, which is a series of Chapter articles, which no one buys the book anymore. And it's all downloaded. But I guess that's for that's for non specialists. If you're a specialist in the field, you just read all the literature as it comes out, like journal article by journal article, right?

Well, you try, but there's too many journal articles. So you don't even do that anymore. You hope you talk to your friends, and you figure out what's going on?

Yeah, you will. Actually, this is something interesting that a lot of people ask me, maybe I'll ask you guys, since you do this professionally. How do you go about assessing whether or not a given paper? If you're not a specialist, how do you go about assessing whether a given paper is garbage and

not even clear, you can assess it when you are a specialist. Think it's to me a paper is not garbage. If it if it stands the test of time, if you keep going back to it and you use the results, and you believe the results, and you keep believing them a couple years later, then it's probably good paper.

Do you think that scientists suffer from so like people who write about cooking in science, I have noticed as this is, you know, something I do or not just write about it, talk about it, use it, you know, develop recipes, etc, like kind of the world in which I live? We tend to run one or two experiments, and then incorrectly assume that we have information that exceeds what we've tested. And therefore say, for instance, I'm thinking about what I'm working on now, in terms of should you salt meat before you cook it? Right. And so I've always had kind of a very standard story about what you know what I think the answer is, other people have had a 100% diametrically opposed theory about what you should do, and they kind of stand by it. And I think like all of us are suffering from this idea that we run only a couple of experiments, and then assume that we know more than we know, I know, this is an issue in in cooking, but I'm assuming that's also an entry problem, and with science, in general is kind of getting over your, you know, assuming that your results tell you more than they do.

I think that happens a lot. And I think I think it's probably the same in science as it is in cooking that you probably know, there are a few authors in cooking, whose work you really trust. If they say something, you know, they really done the right experiments. And they really back the weather statements with something you believe and think it's the same in science that you learn to trust certain people. And, of course, science is forever growing, as I'm sure cooking literature is. And so a new people come along, you have to be a little skeptical. And you have to wait and see and read their work for a while. Think about them. In science, usually you talk to them, you meet them. And it takes a while to build up to build enough trust that you can really trust them. I suspect it's the same in in the cooking literature. I always tell my students, there's a lot of noise out there and you want to have a little signal in the standout among the noise. That's tough. So you have to write well, you have to do experiments. Well. You have to really have a very high level of integrity in your own work. So that when people read it, they'll trust it.

All right, let's do some questions. You guys may or may not have answers. I may or may not have answers. These are actual questions for listeners unless Matt has specific stuff from the chat room do you even have Matt to Alright, silky wrote in via Instagram, I just listened to Episode 180, which was a long time ago. What are we at now? Episode? 8,000,395? necess? Yeah, I think

now we're like, I don't even know, I have no idea.

I worry, I've been cooking my lobster stock too long. I'm hoping you can tell me the optimal summertime. Many thanks in advance. I don't have a number. So the problem with lobster stock in my opinion, and Neil's you know, nose Noren, our friend is that when you cook the lobster shells too long, it all of a sudden takes tastes takes on what Neil's and I would call a calcium taste. Now whether it actually is calcium or not, it goes from being a nicely flavored kind of lobster situation to like a shellye kind of calcium taste. And maybe pa knows whether like whether that's actually something that's happening, whether extended boiling Can Can I mean, it wouldn't render the calcium more soluble. Right? But maybe I don't know, what do you think? What do you think that is? You ever have any thoughts on that?