Kashrus Conundrums & Myths -Ben Yomo Episode #6

[Music] in this episode of enyoma we're going to talk about castro's conundrums and myths all those things that you've asked you've wanted to ask or you've been scared to ask in today's world the average kosher kitchen has two point three seven ovens milkhikes flagships para pesos upstairs downstairs next door and we automatically assume that you need to have a separate oven for every different kinds of baking the truth is is that it's not so simple in fact many years ago more than one oven in the kitchen was extremely rare how do we manage the use of one oven in a kosher kitchen the oven that has to be designated for either milks or flakes so the way that we had to do it was to make sure that the oven is clean make a single designation of either milk or meat that could be done uncovered and the other designation and then when you go to go ahead and to cook the milks if you had a if your oven was considered to be designated flashes it has to be clean anything was cooked dry can be left uncovered anything that had a milk sauce had to be covered [Music] lately people have stoned countertops granite or marble everybody wants to know can i stop covering my countertop for pesach can i just casher it and of course you can cash your countertop we discussed that in another beniomo episode people want to make it a little bit easier for themselves they don't like the idea of pouring boiling water it gets on the floor it gets in your drawers let me just use a steamer so we decided that we're going to buy a steamer on amazon and see if it works it's a quite an expensive steamer it's a super pro heavy duty steamer so i'm going to ask everybody tendler to see if he can cash or something with it let me just point out that a steamer is can be very very hot but in order to cash her we're going to need ricegum we're going to need boiling water and we're going to need water steam is not enough let's take let's take a look and see if this will make it happen steam is water that becomes a gas after it gets over boiling temperature of 212 degrees however it's not water it's a gas and therefore you can't caution with gas you need to caution with actual water so although this machine is a steamer which means it has super hot water inside it and is shooting out liquid or gas at super hot temperatures that does not necessarily translate into water actually touching the countertop all right so let's see how hot this thing actually is okay starting to get hot so in order to cash you need to have water and not steam so let's see if there's any water actually coming out of this thing although it's coming out hot as rabbi holland just demonstrated let's see if it's actually water water is a liquid liquid that goes up must come down so let's see if there's anything coming down as opposed to steam which will just dissipate into the air too much water let's see if it's hot now steam is super hot and we got over 300 degrees but that's not enough to caution it has to be water so the theory is is that steam eventually when it cools down will turn to water so let's see if we can try this by shooting steam on it having it turned to water on the cold countertop and then trying to heat up that water with the steam even though the steam does condense on the countertop but it's at a temperature that's nowhere near a caution temperature it's not even the odds the lettuce bowl so everybody tyler is there any machine out there that can efficiently capture a countertop in a holographically correct way so we tested dozens of models of type different types of steering machines that you know under ten thousand dollars obviously there are industrial machines that can actually shoot boiling water but those are usually diesel powered and cost tens of thousands of dollars range using industrial cleaning systems so for home purposes it's not so practical we did find one machine that actually will fit the bill in the sense that it shoots boiling water boiling water that is at temperatures that can actually contour a countertop the tornado vs4 is the only machine that we found that actually works let's show you how it operates now is this an expensive item this little machine over here cost over a thousand dollars but it does accomplish the job for those of us in the cautious industry we use this machine hundreds of times a year let's give it a shot and see how it works first let's see if it's hot that's perfect boiling water this machine allows you to mix water into the steam flow which makes it possible to cash according to let's see how this machine shoots steam mixed with hot water and there you have it water could you show us what catching with the tornado looks like sure so this shoots out a jet of water probably about this long after that we're it's a very narrow stream so i do is i hold it on an angle against the counter and you get about a wide swath about that much that's actually me hit by the water every time i move the nozzle and that's how you could properly caution your countertops with the machine that shoots boiling water another advantage of a machine like this is that it makes it very easy to capture a sink with a direct stream of boiling hot water so let's see if this machine suits steam or water let's try the other machine so you're staying at a hotel somewhere on a business trip and you come downstairs in the morning and have a breakfast buffet how do you figure out what you could have for breakfast so let's think about cereal the cereal looks like kosher cereal but you don't know where it came from it could be cheerios or some off-brand maybe it has a hamster maybe it doesn't have a hamster bottom line you need to go back and look the same would go for bagels they'll have bagels there that may not have come into any contact with non-kosher and very likely might be kosher you need to go in the back and take a look and see if there's a hacksaw i've never had a problem generally hotel staff is very accommodating they'll show you their cut fruit they'll show you the cereals they'll show you the baked goods and very often you'll be able to have quite a nice breakfast in the non-kosher hotel i cannot tell you how many times we've got the question in the star k they have a waffle iron there that's brought by a company that is dedicated to waffles and they have a waffle batter that comes from a kosher company can i use that waffle iron the answer is no unfortunately you cannot use the waffle iron is is that caleb that are used for hot could potentially have been used for things that are not kosher and therefore the aloha is that stamp calendar and roshus that are used for hot may not be used unless you know for a fact that they are 100 kosher which is impossible to know in any hotel and therefore a waffle iron or an oatmeal machine or an oatmeal cooker in a hotel may not be used i'll add on top of that is that anyone who lived in a bahrain dealer in arizona knows for certain all kinds of items that you can cook with waffle irons that are not just waffles so therefore i would beware in a cold environment we're not worried about cross-contamination unless there was physical contact so as long as you see things that are separated and they're not dirty and they haven't come to contact with the other foods there if you could go in the back and confirm that they're crushed you could eat them you're going to hotel breakfast bar and they have cut up fruit there many times an industry secret is that that fruit is actually not cut up in the hotel that comes pre-cut from an industrial facility and industrial facilities that produce cut up fruit all they do is fruit and nothing else and there's almost no cautious concerns with such items if they're saying i don't know there's no say in the oven it's a it's it's a fact either there is or there isn't it's not up that's him if there's uh it was in heaven now today we have ovens with a window in the oven so when you bake in the oven you see the window gets steamed up so you see there's air in the oven but i say that it's uh it's a right the opposite way from that window that's themed up you see that there is no there in oven how is that because why does the the the reason to think there's no there in an oven is because the water vapor will only condense on a on a cold surface and so there's water vape in the air all the time so when it gets cold it rains because it condenses in the on the coal on the coal there so in the oven the coldest place in an oven is by the window because in the rest of the oven there's insulation between the two walls of the oven which keeps all the heat in but by the window there's no there's two panes there's a paint on the inside there on the outside but there's no insulation in between for some reason or another so you should be able to see in and that's why there's steam there you see because it's the coldest place but in the rest of the oven there's no there's no steam there's no and if you open up the oven and you try to because it's too hot for any steam to attach itself so if you cook in the oven there probably is steam the chocolate has usually done where you're baking in an oven didn't usually cook in an oven you know you could cook but they didn't i think they're mostly baked when you bake even though that there's water vapor that get that that is coming off the baked item but the ovens had a chimney and the chimney was open so the air had to flow through every oven if you don't have air flowing through it it'll burn everything will burn so that's the whole concept making an oven to the air flow should be even that one part shouldn't get more hot than the other that's why so many people are not much clearer from pesach when they have these inserts that to get a good baked product over there because depending on the oven it's not that one insert can work for every for every other so ovens they used to have a chimney in the back of the in the back of the of the range they used to be a place where the hot air used to come out from the oven they later changed that and they made the hot air come out of a back burner from through back this is in a gas oven through a back burner so the heat goes through the oven comes out to a back burner and that was a big shiloh over there because if you you um you will have flashings in the oven cooking is in the oven and then you had a milky pot sitting on the back burner cold sitting there no fires on but the the heat of the of the oven first of all all the water from the from the uh from from this meat that was coming off from the cooking of the meat uh condensed on this pot and it got really hot from all the heat going through the oven so we made a big shower on this part whether you could use it anymore for for milks anyway all for fresh so the um today a lot they have a new thing that the heat of the oven and a lot of ovens comes out through the top of the door you see on the top of the door like 10 or 12 holes with some they very often have some netting in that hole and that's where the hot air comes out you have to have a place for hot air to flow through otherwise it's not going to work you