Beano and its potential effect on gut health

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Today, we'll be talking about the supplement Beano and its potential effect on gut health. Also, a listener asks, "What's the point of baking something crispy only to pour wet stuff on top of it as so many recipes have you do?" But first, a deep dive into pasta water. Don't get boiled. "Ask Adam" Noah: Hey Adam. I was recently making lunch with my half Italian American grandmother and she asked me to do something that feels like sacrilege to me, despite being mostly Italian American. While we're making lunch, it was my first time draining the pasta in her home. And after I drained the pasta, she instructed me to rinse it because, and I quote, "Who needs all the extra starch anyway?" Despite gently pushing back in the way that you can do to your grandmother saying, "Well, sometimes the starch that's on the surface helps sauces to stick.

And I know sometimes pasta water is saved to make sauces.". She insisted that we should rinse it. So I did what a dutiful grandson does and I rinsed it. My question is this, how many calories are in that rinse water? How much calorically am I rinsing off by rinsing my pasta? Adam: Well, the content of pasta water has culinary as well as nutritional implications. And we're going to address both of those right now, but let's start with the nutritional since you asked. Believe it or not, I do have an answer for you about the caloric content of pasta water. Modern science has answered this question, not because it matters on any kind of individual nutritional level. It doesn't.

We are talking about a tiny difference in calories. This is a ridiculous question as it pertains to individual human nutrition, and you know that. It is not a ridiculous question as it pertains to large scale commercial food production, chain restaurants, packaged food manufacturers. The amount of pasta lost in the cooking water is referred to as cooking loss and people absolutely do measure and think about cooking loss in the context of large scale food manufacturing. If you can shave a few percentage points off of your cooking loss, multiply that across all the tons of food that your company produces, and it adds up to real money that you are either saving or pouring down the drain. So I'll refer now to the most recent and most comprehensive study on pasta cooking loss that I can find. It is a 2016 paper out of Warsaw University. The amount of food science coming out of Poland in recent years is crazy and deserves recognition.

Anyway, in this experiment, they were evaluating how different pasta drying methods affect cooking loss. So fast, very high temperature drying, basically drying in a big oven versus slow temperature drying, sort of room temperature or a little bit above drying, and then low pressure drying, drying in a vacuum chamber. That is the hot new thing. To determine cooking loss, they simply measured the dry weight of the pasta, collected the cooking water after they cooked it, they evaporated the cooking water for 16 hours, and weighed the remaining solids to compare that weight to the original dry weight of the whole product. The cooking loss is ranged between about four and 6%, lowest with the vacuum drying and highest with the low temperature drying. That's surprising to me. High cooking loss is regarded as an indicator of poor quality pasta. Low temperature drying is generally regarded as the higher quality process because it is the traditional process.

It is the most time consuming process. It preserves more micronutrients — that's been shown in other studies. People say that it preserves more flavor and yet low temperature drying results in greater cooking loss, which is generally a marker of poor quality.

Vacuum drying resulted in the least cooking loss, 4%.

And it also apparently yielded pasta with a much brighter yellow color, which is generally regarded as a good thing in the pasta industry. Vacuum drying also yielded firmer cooked pasta also generally regarded as a positive, and it yielded pasta that was less sticky. Some would call that a plus. I think that's debatable.

But regardless, the authors speculate that vacuum drying simply results in less damage to the structure of the noodle because the drying is more even, you don't get situations where the outside dries faster than the inside and therefore the outside shrinks faster than the inside does. And this introduces stress into the structure, you get cracks and those cracks leech more starch and protein into the water during cooking. Greater cooking loss, more gelatinized starch floating around in the water making the surface of the noodle stickier. Vacuum drying minimizes all of that. Got to get my hands on some vacuum dried pasta. I want to check it out. But looking at conventional drying methods, it seems as though cooking loss is usually somewhere between five and 8% of the original dry weight of the product. Anything beyond eight is considered very poor quality pasta according to another paper that I found.

Cooking loss, of course, will also depend on how you cook it, how long. These tests are done in water at a rolling boil to the point where the noodle is al dente. So let's assume that you're cooking your pasta like that. Let's assume your cooking loss is 6%, right. How many calories is that? Well, a hundred grams is a good starting point for a portion of pasta, a hundred grams dried. That's a little less than a quarter pound, a little less than a quarter of the one pound box in the US or the 500 gram box everywhere else. One pound in the US is 454 grams. It's usually a little smaller.

My dad used to make the whole one pound box for the four of us, and we usually didn't quite finish it all. So a hundred grams dried is a single portion. I usually figure. According to the U.S. Department of Agriculture, a hundred grams dry pasta has 371 calories. That's obviously going to depend on the specific recipe and drying method and such, but we'll go with 370 calories. When I say specific recipe, I mean the recipe for the pasta itself. This doesn't include all of the creamy sauce and stuff that you're going to pour on.

We're just talking about the pasta itself. Its exact calorie content is going to depend on the specific recipe of the pasta and how it was dried and processed and all of that. But let's go ahead and assume 370 calories for that 100 gram portion of pasta. 6% of that, that you lose in the cook water, that's 22. 22 calories lost in the boil water.

Assuming the content of the lost matter

Is roughly equal in proportion to the content of the total dried pasta mass.

I'll tell you what I mean by that.

According to the USDA, dried pasta is about 69% starch, nice; 13% protein; 3% fiber; 3% sugar; 2% fat; and the remaining 10% is probably mostly water.

Dried pasta still has some water in it. And everything else in there, that 10% that's not water, would be very small amounts of lots of other things. A little sodium, all the micronutrients, the minerals, et cetera. It's reasonable to suspect that some of those contents might be more soluble than others, more likely to leech out into the boil water. But pasta is mostly starch and secondarily protein and starch and protein both have four calories per gram, conventionally counted. And that's a little debatable. We've talked about that before, but let's go with four calories per gram in both protein and starch. Pasta is mostly protein and starch.

So I'm going to say for the purposes of this math, the caloric content of the loss, the pasta loss in the boil water, that caloric content is proportional to the caloric content of the total dry pasta mass. So we get about 20 calories lost in the water per portion. That is our back of the envelope calculation. I suppose that could be a meaningful difference to someone really closely monitoring their calories. Somebody on a highly controlled diet like an athlete who needs to be super lean for whatever their sport is or someone with an eating disorder. Those are the only people to whom I think 20 calories would matter. I can't find any information about whether calorie counts on food packaging account for cooking loss. It seems like maybe they should, and I can't figure out if they do.

Say that you use some of your starchy pasta water in the sauce for your pasta. This is a very common technique. How many calories are you adding back into your food by adding back in some of the pasta water that has the cook loss in it? This is going to depend on how much water you boiled in the first place, right? You can successfully boil pasta in a giant cauldron of water or in a pretty small pot. As long as the noodles have enough space to swell up and move around a little and not stick to each other. The less water you use, the more concentrated your cooking loss will be inside that water. Indeed, there's a famous recipe that relies on this fact, talking about Kenji's three ingredient, Mac and cheese, right? He puts the macaroni in a sauce pan with just enough water to cover. He boils it stirring frequently so that it doesn't all stick together. That's one reason restaurants boil pasta in a giant pot of water.

So they don't have to stand around stirring it. They don't have time for that in a restaurant. Anyway, Kenji boils the macaroni until it's pretty much absorbed all the water. Then he puts in evaporated milk and any good normal melting cheese. It doesn't have to be a processed cheese slice with emulsifying salts holding it together. The gelatinized starch in the water combined with the casing proteins in the milk, that's enough to emulsify the sauce, to keep the fat in the cheese from separating out into an oil slick. It's a really great recipe. The sauce texture is absolutely not as smooth as a cheese sauce made with emulsifying salts, sodium citrate or sodium phosphate.

The stuff that binds nacho cheese and American cheese.

You don't get that unnatural level of

Smoothness, but kenji's recipe is still pretty darn smooth.

He's also a fan of emulsifying salts. It's not an either or a proposition. You can have both in your life. Anyway, point is: the less water you use to boil the pasta, the more concentrated your cooking loss will be inside that water. And therefore the more calories you're going to be adding back in, if you use pasta water in your sauce. I suppose in Kenji's recipe, there is zero cooking loss because he doesn't drain any of the water.

It all becomes part of the sauce. There's less cooking loss when you boil fresh pasta, I should mention. Fresh, not dried pasta. We've been talking about dried pasta this entire time. According to that same study out of Poland, their experiments with fresh pasta showed a cooking loss of about 2%, as opposed to the four to 6% they got with their dried pasta samples. They attribute this less cooking loss to the shorter cooking time required by fresh pasta. Fresh pasta only takes like two minutes to cook. And so that's less time for stuff to break off, right? However, I suspect that in practice, the pasta water from fresh pasta could actually have more starch, more calories than water from dry pasta, even though fresh pasta has less cooking loss.

I believe this to be true, at least in some cases, because when you make fresh pasta yourself at home, you generally toss it in a bunch of flour to keep it from sticking to itself before you get a chance to cook it. And that flower that you toss it in, that all dissolves into the water when you drop the pasta. Anytime I make fresh pasta at home, the boil water is just frothing with starch gel because of all of the bench flour that hits the ride into the pot on the pasta. Unfortunately, these are all different questions from the one we started with, which is, how many calories does the pasta shed if you not only boil and drain it, but also if you rinse it? Grandma said, "Go and drain this pasta and then rinse it because nobody needs all that starch.". Cooked pasta does indeed have a sticky film of gelatinized starch on it, a residue from the cooking water in part, I'm sure. I imagine it also consists of starch granules or fragments of granules that are actually embedded in the structure of the pasta. And part of them got hot enough and wet enough to gelatinize. Yes, it is commonly believed that you can wash some of that starch gel away.

I think that's probably true. And this is often done in recipes for pasta salad. When you're making a pasta salad, you drain the noodles and then you rinse them with cold water to A, stop the cooking so that it doesn't go mushy. B, accelerates the cooling process, given that pasta salad is served cold. Otherwise, it's not pasta salad, it's just pasta. And C, you rinse it to get off that starch gel so that the pasta pieces don't stick together into one giant glob in the fridge. Starch gel like most gels thickens considerably as it cools. That's why.

Thanksgiving gravy thickened with starch comes out of the fridge looking like a brown jello dessert. Starch gel that would make a hot pasta pleasantly thick and gooey will turn a cold pasta into a solid block of noodles, a cold casserole, not a pasta salad. I do wonder if grandma in this case was making pasta salad, because that would be the most logical reason for her to rinse the pasta or have you rinse the pasta.

People generally think hot pasta dishes are

Improved by a little starch gel.

It thickens the sauce, which helps hold

Fat globules in suspension, maintains the emulsion of your sauce.

How many calories are you sparing yourself by washing away that otherwise beneficial gel? I don't know. I have no science to cite for that. However, I would educatedly guess that it's a very, very small number of calories that you're washing away.

Why? Because the starch is gelatinized. Starch occurs naturally in wheat and other foods in these tightly packed little balls of millions of individual starch molecules. Those are the granules. Those groups of millions of starts molecules. If you were to cut one of these granules in half and look at the cross section, it would resemble the cross section of like a Gobstopper or I guess a kidney stone, which is to say it has lots and lots of concentric layers. They're literally growth rings. As the plant grows, it deposits layer after layer of starch onto each of the granules. Most of the starch granules are left intact in the pasta.

The process of milling the wheat down into flour that damages some of the granules. Some of them get cracked open, but they are largely intact in the final flower. And they swell somewhat when mixed with water to make the dough, but most of them do not burst. When you boil the pasta, some of the starch swells up with water and bursts. This is called gelatinization. And when it happens, the starch expands to many times its original size. Assuming that I am reading this starch swelling power chart correctly, that I found, a chart of the swelling power of different starches, wheat starch will generally expand to about 20 times its original mass once gelatinized. So it's a measure of weight rather than volume, but the two are related, right? 20 times its original mass once gelatinized.

That additional weight is water trapped inside the matrix that's created when starches explode. Imagine if the shirt that you're wearing right now, imagine if that shirt suddenly exploded into all of its constituent threads. You could tangle up a whole lot of stuff in that mass of threads. And that's how starches form a gel with water when they get hot and wet enough to explode. So the starch is now 20 times the size that it was before, but it has the same number of calories. Each starch molecule is a chain or branch of glucose, hundreds or thousands of glucose subunits, they're called. Your body will eventually digest all of those into individual glucose molecules to burn as fuel. And the amount of energy you can get from that glucose is measured in this unit that we call a calorie, for short, but technically the full name is kilocalorie.

We generally express calories in units of a thousand calories because actual individual mono calories or whatever, it's a tiny amount of energy. So nobody ever really talks about those except in scientific context when we talk about like food packaging and food calories. If it lists a hundred calories, technically it's giving you a hundred kilocalories, which means it's a hundred thousand calories. Anyway, when starch gelatinizes, it expands 20 times, but it still has the same number of glucose sub units. Same number of calories. The added mass is water, which has no calories. So the starch gel clinging to your pasta water has about 1/20th of the calorie density of the pasta itself.

Or rather let's say 1/10th, because at

This point we're talking about cooked pasta.

 

Pasta swells up with water as it cooks. It generally about doubles in mass when you cook it. So we'll talk about this starch gel that's on the surface is having 1/10th, the calorie density of the cooked pasta. And it's just not a lot of calories. I'm sure the science here is way more complicated than I'm making it sound. It usually is, but we're doing back of the envelope math here. We're podcasting. We're not sending our rocket to Mars.

We don't have to be super accurate. My point is: you're probably washing away a tiny, tiny handful of calories when you rinse your cooked pasta. I'm going to guess five. I'm going to guess two M&M'S worth of calories. Five calories washed away from a single portion of pasta weighing 100 grams prior to cooking, five calories washed away when you rinse off that starchy gel on the surface. That's my guess. If anyone with a laboratory out there wants to do an experiment to prove me wrong, email me, askadamquestions@gmail and let's do it. I would love to come to your lab and make a video about that.

We could simply wash the cooked pasta with distilled water, retain the resulting rinse water, dry it, and weigh the remaining solids. Come to think of it, I could maybe do that myself. I would have to buy a special scale, but I think I maybe could do that. It would be the most useless, scientific finding ever, but that's never stocked me before. Two other things that I will say about pasta water before we move on. One, remember that it's probably really salty. We generally salt our pasta boil water, right, because that's how we get salt into the pasta. Dried pasta is generally not made with any salt in the dough.

I have a whole video about why that is the case, but I will summarize it to thusly. Salt interferes with the early stages of gluten formation when you're making a dough. Therefore, back in the olden days, when people were mixing pasta dough by hand, they might have noticed that putting salt in the dough made it take longer to knead. And so, they stopped putting the salt in because kneading is hard. That is my hypothesis based on my experiments. Take it for what it's worth, which probably isn't much. For whatever reason, it just became tradition to season the water, not the pasta. That means that you'll have a lot of excess salt in the pasta water after you're done cooking with it.

And if you don't account for that salt when you're making your sauce, you could end up with a really overly salty sauce by the time you mix in some of your pasta water.

So under season your sauce, if you

Plan to mix in some pasta water.

The other remaining thing I want to

Discuss is how to best capture pasta water for your sauce.

Chefs don't think about this very much because in a restaurant where they just have a giant cauldron of water boiling for pasta all the time, they just simply dip a ladle into the pot and they splash the water into their sauce pan. But when we cook at home, we usually don't boil pasta in a giant cauldron all night. We boil one batch of pasta, right? And then we drain the whole pot. We're not going to turn around and cook another portion and another portion and another portion all night long. So we do one portion in the pan and then we drain the whole pan.

So the most common way that I retain some water for the sauce is I just don't drain my pasta very thoroughly. I usually drain through a little gap in the pot lid rather than using a sieve or a colander. This saves on dirty dishes. The only problem is, it's hard to thoroughly drain pasta that way, through a gap in the pot lid. The good news is I usually don't want to thoroughly drain the pasta. I want some of that starchy water for my sauce. So I just leave a little behind. If I'm in a situation where I'm not sure how much water I'm going to want in the final dish, I put a glass or a measuring jug or something in the sink.

And as I drain the pasta, I let some of it fall into the glass. Then I can drop the pasta into the sauce, grab the glass and pour in as much or as little of the water as it seems like it needs to get the sauce texture that I want. Pretty good system. I believe in it, but you do you. Chris: Hey Adam, this is Chris from Arizona, and a Beckett too. And I've been taking your advice about fiber, especially beginning to beans. I've always really loved brussel sprouts, bunch of cruciferous vegetables, love that stuff. And I also have taken your advice about Beano.

It works pretty well. My question is, how does the Beano affect gut health? Adam: First of all, Beckett is a good doggie. If you're only listening to the audio version of the show, Beckett is a dog and apparently good dog. Secondly, Chris asks a very good question and the short answer is nobody knows, but I don't think there's any particular reason to be worried about Beanos effect on your gut health or any other aspect of your health. But it's still a good question, because Beano definitely could affect your gut. Beano is the brand name of a dietary supplement. The active ingredient of which is the enzyme alpha-galactosidase. Alpha-galactosidase, through some very crazy biochemistry that I don't pretend to understand, helps to break down complex carbohydrates that you would otherwise not be able to digest.

Complex carbs are molecules consisting of primarily glucose and other simple sugars bonded together in enormous chains or branching trees, potentially thousands of sugars all bonded together. Your body makes enzymes that help you break down complex carbs into simple sugars that you can actually absorb via the lining of your small intestine. Starch is a big category of complex carbs that we can usually digest pretty well thanks to the amylase enzymes that we make primarily in our pancreas. That's a process that starts by the way in your mouth. As you chew, there's amylase in your saliva and scientists have speculated that may be one reason why starchy foods taste good to us, even though theoretically, we shouldn't be able to taste starch at all.

It may be that you eat the

Potato and some of the starches in the potato breakdown in your mouth into sugars that you taste as sweet before you swallow them.

Further enzymatic things happen all the way up and down your digestive system that break down your food for you. It's not just in your mouth, it happens all the way through.

Anyway, we're pretty good at breaking down starch, but we're not so good at breaking down other complex carbs. Complex carbs we can't digest are known as fiber or roughage as the Brits would say. The biggest example, being cellulose, the most abundant organic substance on earth. Most plants are chiefly made of, well, number one, water; and then number two, cellulose. And cellulose we cannot digest at all. Technically, I don't think any animal can digest cellulose. Cows, and rabbits, and termites, and such, do not digest cellulose directly, but they do play host to symbiotic microorganisms that eat the cellulose. And then the animals are able to digest the resulting bacterial waste products.

That's why cows can live on grass. They have a super complex digestive system filled with bacteria that ferment the cellulose into sugars that the cow can actually digest. Beano, as far as I can see, does not help you break down cellulose. And that's not a huge problem because cellulose is such a gigantic and complex molecule, the bacteria in your guts are not very good at breaking down cellulose either. Again, if you want bacteria to handle cellulose for you, you're going to need to grow a complex multi chambered stomach like a cow to give bacteria time and proper conditions necessary to handle cellulose. Most cellulose we eat, we simply pass. It adds bulk to our stools and therefore it helps us sweep out all the other stuff in there. And that is one of many reasons why dietary fiber is good.

However, there are other complex carbs we eat that our gut bacteria can handle like oligosaccharides, which are kind of semi complex carbs. They are three to 10 simple sugars bonded together. Examples include raffinose, stachyose, verbascose, probably not saying those rights. These are abundant in vegetables and legumes. Your body can break down some of the oligosaccharides that you eat, but not all of them. So a lot of them pass to your large intestine where gut bacteria feast upon them creating various waste products in the course of doing so. And these include gaseous waste products. And that creates a problem for you, the host organism.

Beano, supplementary alpha-galactosidase is a thing you can eat with your food. And at some point in the digestive system, I'm not totally sure where, it will catalyze the breakdown of oligosaccharides into simple sugars that you can absorb in your small intestine before they ever reach the bacteria in your large intestine. It should be said that Beano therefore increases the calories you're consuming. And I've not found any research indicating by how much, but it's probably very small, just like the pasta water thing. Probably not a big deal because Beano isn't that effective. It's been shown to help reduce gas a little bit. There's a 1994 study out of UC San Diego.

Beano first hit the market in the

'90s so that's when they did the studies.

This paper is hilarious by the way.

You can find it free on the internet. The authors clearly had a lot of fun writing it. I quote, "For many individuals, the cramping, bloating, and flatulence associated with a high fiber diet are unacceptable. For others; however, the production of high volumes or resonant, pungent intestinal gas is a source of personal pride and fulfillment and can be used as a greeting or other form of communication," end quote. And that last claim in the paper that was published in a real scientific journal by real medical scientists, that last claim actually has an inline citation. The claim that some people fart to communicate is sourced to, "Personal communication, M Bowersox, San Diego, California, April, 1992." That's some rock solid sourcing right there. I have identified a few people named M Bowersox who could conceivably be the source of this claim.

People who would've had connections to the UC San Diego School of Medicine in the early 1990s. I don't want to doxx you, M Bowersox. I'll leave it to you to come forward after all these years, and clear the air, spill the beans. Tell us about the fart talkers of Southern California. Are they still in San Diego? Have they been driven into the wilds of Imperial County? Lead us to the fart talkers, M. Bowersox. I offer you peace, M Bowersox. I can help you to do the right thing.

So when you're ready, you find me. Anyway, the authors of this study had people eat a three bean chili with a bunch of veggies in it. Half the people got Beano with their meal, half got a placebo. And the Beano helped a little, particularly around four or five hours after the meal, which is about when you would expect your meal to be hitting your large intestine, where the gas is created. Pretty dramatic reduction in a recorded flatulence events around there, four to five hours after the meal. Other studies came to similar findings, Beano helps a noticeable amount, but it does not fully de wind you, not even close. What that tells us is: your gut bacteria are still being fed. You are not completely depriving them of stuff to metabolize by eating Beano.

Of course, gut health is way more complicated than that. It is conceivable that Beano really only knocks out one kind of oligosaccharides and that one kind of gut bacteria that really depended on that oligosaccharides they end up dying in your intestine because you're not feeding them enough. And maybe that has implications for your health. Lots of things in your microbiome do have major implications for your health. I can find no studies examining the effect of Beano on the microbiome. I did find a number of interesting, totally unrelated studies co-authored by Dr. A Beano, Abdullah Beano at Boston Children's Hospital. Bet he is a great doctor.

It's totally possible that Beano could have some harmful effect on your microbiome, but I'm not super worried about it for the reasons that I've already given, and because alpha-galactosidase is not a foreign substance in your body. This particular alpha-galactosidase that you're getting from the Beano that is exogenous, when you get it from Beano, right. Your bodies didn't make that particular alpha-galactosidase, but your body does make alpha-galactosidase.

Alpha-galactosidase plays a crucial role in all

Kinds of metabolic processes in humans.

In fact, people whose bodies don't make alpha-galactosidase because of some kind of genetic abnormality, people who don't have alpha-galactosidase naturally in their body, they suffer from a condition called Fabry disease. Symptoms of which include a burning pain in the extremities; gastrointestinal pain; kidney disease; enlarged heart; little red spots on the skin; tinnitus ringing in the ears; all kinds of bad things. So your body needs alpha-galactosidase. It is nothing new to your body.

In the case of Beano, it's just being made by black mold instead of being made by your body. And you're eating it, and maybe that changes how it affects your body. The fact that it's entering through your upper digestive system, biochemistry is super complicated, but nobody seems really worried about Beano. My question is, does taking Beano delay the process by which your microbiome adjusts to an increase in dietary fiber? We've talked about this in an earlier episode of the pod. There's a couple of studies that show that people who suddenly start to eat more beans, they find that their gas explodes, but then it settles back into a normal range after several weeks of regular daily bean-eating. The likely explanation is that you are feeding populations of gut bacteria that are eventually able to multiply and metabolize the molecules that comprise the intestinal gas. They're eating your gas. If you think about people in places like India, who maybe get most of their dietary protein from grain and pulses, legumes, they're not blowing ass all the time in India, or at least I presume they're not.

Write in and tell me from India, if you have any lived experience on this topic. I assume you're not all blowing ass all the time even though you eat tons of lentils because they are delicious and plentiful in your cuisine. A human system adjusts to a higher fiber diet. And what I wonder, is that adjustment hindered in some way by taking Beano? It seems like it could be. It seems like a relatively easy thing to study and some graduate student in the audience should do that experiment. If you think it's a frivolous question, remember that excessive meat eating is probably a significant driver of global warming and other environmental problems. Individual and planetary health would probably benefit from everybody getting more of their protein from legumes and a big reason people don't, many, many consumer studies have shown, is because of the gas problem. Science needs to help address the gas problem.

I guarantee you, there is foundation money available for that kind of research if you pitch it the way that I just did. Kelly: Hi Adam, my name is Kelly and I'm from Florida and this is Rusty. And I have a question about baking savory dishes. I have recently baked two savory dishes that put me through a lot of effort to make something crispy only to then douse it in something soggy afterwards. I made Chicken Parmesan and I breaded the chicken and I got it all crispy and then covered in tomato sauce. So, what was the point? And then now I'm making a chicken cheddar bake and you get a nice crispy crust on top with breadcrumbs and then cover it with tomato slices, again, making it soggy. So, what is the point in going through all of the effort to make something nice and crispy if you're just going to put something soggy on it afterwards? I don't get it. Thanks for your help.

And I love the pod. Adam: First of all, Rusty is a very good, whatever Rusty is. Rusty is definitely not a dog. I'm guessing Rusty is a ferret, but I'm no ferret expert. Rusty could easily be some kind of petite freshwater seal for all I know.

In fact, I'm going to go with that.

Rusty, the seal.

Good seal.

Anyway, the wet bread problem. Preach, Kelly, preach. Devotees know that one of my earliest videos is my Chicken Parm recipe, and I do not sauce the chicken. I fry the chicken. I get it crispy. I put sauce around the chicken on the plate, or maybe under it. And that preserves the crispy top. More sauces should be served on the side.

There's no shame in serving sauce on the side. You're not outsourcing work to your guests. I suspect chefs have the same reservation about sauce on the side as they do about table salt. Western restaurants, all used to have salt and pepper on the table for guests to add to their food at will. Then this horrible thing happened where nicer places stopped putting out salt and pepper on the table. You have to ask for it now. And the waiters will probably give you attitude about it. No, no, no.

You must experience the chef's vision exactly as he intends. And I say he, because I do think this is a particularly male attitude. It doesn't count if I'm not the one who does it to you, baby. I will say that baked or fried cereals do have a historic function in food that's totally apart from providing crispiness. Sometimes we use them as sponges, right? Not just Chicken Parm, but think about all of the battered or breaded fried meat dishes that are tossed in a wet sauce. All of the most popular Chinese American style dishes meets that basic description; General. Tso's, Orange Chicken. They're all basically breaded fried chicken nuggets tossed in sauce.

Buffalo wings, crispy fried chicken wings tossed in hot sauce and melted butter. That's what Buffalo wings are. Chicken fried steak, coated in milk gravy. The breading or the batter in these dishes is there to help the sauce cling. It's not there to provide crispiness. However, I think all of these dishes are at their very best when you get them really fresh. Like they fry the meat, they toss it in the sauce, you get it immediately after that. And the chicken bits are still a little crispy underneath the sauce that coats them.

That is some good stuff.

When I was in college at Penn

State, i used to go to the hetzel student union building known as the hub.

And when I was growing up in that town in high school, I grew up in the shadow of the university. The HUB was this dark, super grungy place where you could go and see punk rock shows. I saw The. Donnas play there sometime in the '90s before they were famous. Also, saw R. L.

Burnside, the great. Mississippi blues guitarist before he died and a million terrible local bands, but good times. By the time I was actually a student at Penn State, the HUB had been rehabilitated into a cavernous gleaming white airport terminal look in place without a hint of danger or mystery, but it had two good things. One, a giant salt water aquarium. I love fish tanks. And two, it had a Panda Express. The now multinational Chinese American style, fast food chain. And I refused to apologize for my love of Panda Express Orange Chicken.

That is good stuff. And I had a ritual of going to my morning classes, then slipping into the Panda Express right after it opened at 10:30. And there was no line, and the orange chicken was fresh, right out of the walk and still a little crispy under its sugar sauce. Oh, what I would not give for some of that right now. I suppose there are other examples of wet yet crispy bread. The most obvious being pizza. Pizza is a wet bread dish, but if it's well made and if you get it fresh, the bottom of the bread is still a little crispy. And the rim of the bread, the corness is still crispy.