Aroma Cucina

A Strange Flirtation

I’m having a strange flirtation with ‘molecular gastronomy’, by that I mean I want to explore using chemicals and techniques that are outside the range of the classic chef, techniques that didn’t exist during Escoffier or Pellegrino Artusi’s time.  Now, bearing in mind that I don’t even own a microwave, this is pretty radical for me.

Friday night we ate at Fiamma, a restaurant on Spring St. in Soho.  They have a new chef, Fabio Trabocchi, who is pushing the boundaries between what is considered Italian cooking and what is contemporary, or radical, or molecular. Call it what you will, but we ate sorrel foam and there was some bits of powder, and a strange glowing orb on a spoon that turned out to be a pear skin with pear gel inside, and it was all excellent, and tasty, and satisfying.  So, if this is cutting edge cuisine, or molecular, than I want to learn how to cook like this.

Last night, the Culinary Historian Society of NY hosted a talk with Herve This and Mitchell Davis.  Herve This is the mack daddy of molecular gastronomy; he holds the only degree that has ever been issued for this science. Mitchell Davis is a cookbook author, a chef, and the vice president of the James Beard foundation.  Mr. Davis is also a sociologist and raised some interesting points last night about the current state of restaurant dining. Not home dining, but restaurant dining. He called what’s going on now to be multi-sensory theater.  Showing us photos from Alien where burning leaves enhance the smell of a pheasant croquette, or a juniper pillow is placed under a plate and as the pillow deflates the aroma of juniper fills the air. Of course, it’s a bit silly and over wrought, but it is avant-garde in the traditional sense, it is cutting edge. It’s not what you might crave on a blustery Tuesday night for dinner, but there is truly a place for this kind of dining, but there is something going on here that will be changing the way all of us conceive, prepare and eat our food.
I’m still not going out to buy a microwave, or burn my Slow Food membership card, but I really do want to fool around with that liquid nitrogen.
And the photo? That’s “cubes that float”… I can’t remember the French name that was given to it last night where it was served as part of the aperitivo hour before the lecture, but it was apple cider and Guinness with an apple and olive oil gelatin cube floating in it. An intriguing looking creation of the desert chef Will Goldfarb, but somebody needsto do some flavor adjustments on this one because it was unpalatably bitter. Back to the kitchen…or to the lab on that one. 

Avocado Creme

Now this is a ‘foam’ that I know works. I’ve made this lots of times, usually as a foil for spicy shrimp, but last night this crème was delicious, just eaten on a piece of Belgian Endive.
And you know I’m eating avocados now, because when I go back to Italy….no more guacamole fore me. The Umbrians don’t believe in avocados.

Here’s the recipe for avocado crème:
1 ripe avocado
1/3 cup heavy whipping cream
Pinch of salt, pinch of smoked adobe chili and a few squirts of lemon juice
½ t chopped shallots, marinated in red wine vinegar

Make the whipped cream.  Start with a chilled bowl, a chilled whisk and very cold cream. It will all whisk up in a med-firm cream in just a few minutes of whisking. Quit your whining, it’s a quick upper body workout. 
Cut the avocado in half, remove the pit (there must be something that you can do with those pits, there are so nice and smooth and round, but yet, they don’t bounce very much).
Mush ½ of the avocado into the cream and whisk together.
Squirt the lemon juice on the other half of the avocado and mush it into the pulp, then add it to the cream and whisk everything all together.  I worry about the lemon juice and the crème not getting along, so that’s why I combine it with the avocado pulp first.
Add some salt, little chili powder, give it a mix, garnish with the marinated shallots, and you are good to go.
If you want to try this with shrimp, combine some bay leaves, garlic, hot chilies, salt, pepper, and whatever other spices are talking to you at that moment. Leave the shrimp in their shells.
Heat a cast iron pan, with out oil. When it’s hot, add a small amount of oil, then the spices, then and the shrimp. Quickly toss and coat the shrimp with all the spices. Serve them in their shells, with the avocado crème on as a dipping sauce. It’s cools down the spices and just is an addictive combination.

Emulsion Experiments

Thanks God the Herve This's  book has to go back to the library. I’m becoming obsessed. The man’s appetite for experimenting is infectious; he inspires you to go play in the kitchen.
This intrigued me: making a cheese or foie gras ‘sauce’ with just heat and water. This would be an emulsion; in the simplest terms the fat molecules grab onto the water molecules and they form a stable substance. Mayonnaise is the classic example of an emulsion.
After you had the emulsion, M.This hypothesized that you could then turn it into foam if you whisked it over chilled bowl in an ice bath.
I’m intrigued by the idea of transforming an ingredient without using chemical stabilizers. They have a place; I just want to see how far I can push without using them.

The first experiment was with a piece of duck liver mousse.  Setting up a make shift double boiler, I melted the mousse. It stayed lumpy until a bit of water was added and then it just relaxed and became a smooth mousse sauce. Cool. Then I whisked it, over a bowl of ice water, and while not’foam’ in the current sense, it was a frothy whipped liver mousse.  I stuck in the fridge to see if it would remain stable.
Next was a piece of Gorgonzola dolce (or sweet gorgonzola), it’s soft and creamy, and fatty. It also melted sort of lumpy until the water was added.  It came together as a whipped Gorgonzola fairly quickly, and I kept whisking to see if I could incorporate more air, and make the foam lighter.  It separated, or curdled. Damn.

The next step was to feed my experiments to my in-house taster.
Round 1: cool liver mousse served with warm sherry. I liked it; my taster didn’t like the cool/warm contrast.
Round 2: cool liver mousse served a sliced cornichon.  Honestly, the original block of mousse was sort of tasteless, so the cornichon overpowered the mild mousse.
When I do this again, I’ll use a better quality mousse, and I want to try serving it on a slice of roasted apple.

The cheese was more challenging. I remember M.This saying that whipping or whisking would break up the small lumps, so I re-melted the sauce and whisked unit I had a tasty, but somewhat unstable sauce.  This was served napped over pear-ricotta ravioli. Is that this cheese sauce is a perfect Italian  ‘sauce’; just the pure ingredient, no other conflicting flavors or focus.
I think I need to experiment with other cheeses to see which have the right fat content, and won’t curdle or separate as quickly.

After all these ‘experiments’, I served a main course of a simple, satisfying roast poussin. I have to keep the taster happy or he might not be so willing to just open his mouth and eat whatever I give him.

If anybody else plays around with this concept, let me know. There are so many possibilities!

Playing with Smoke

Grant Achatz, the chef at Alinea, an uber cutting-edge restaurant in Chicago, plays with smoke and scents to engage the diner’s senses.  Lavender pillows that waft scent when the plate is placed in front of you. Smoke filled vessels that flavor the food and the air. 
If this sounds a little crazy, just think about it. Smell is a major component of tasting. Nothing tastes like anything when you have a cold. So, why not enrich the flavors by going directly to the nose? Direct olfactory stimulation wouldn’t give you the full range of flavor, because flavor aroma is also released during the process of chewing. So, no, an all smoke diet would not be satisfying.
The idea of smoke intrigues me. What would benefit from smoke, or a small whiff of mesquite? How can a home chef play with smoke? I don’t have a Smoking Gun, which is made by the nice guys at PolyScience,  although it certainly beats the hell out of burning your fingers on a little piece of flaming mesquite.
My first experiment: BBQ seared scallops with lime zest.  I marinated the scallops for about 45 minutes in a fiery BBQ sauce, pan seared them, added the lime zest, placed them is this sort of petrie dish, and lit a match.  Once I got the mesquite to light and smoke, I placed the smoldering wood shard inside the small glass dish and covered it. 
The question: was there enough smoke to flavor the scallops? The answer was a surprisingly delicate smoke flavor that went naturally with the BBQ flavor of the scallop.
So, what’s next? White beans and shrimp.  Poached chicken with smoky leeks. Smoked potato slices.  I’m not so sure about smoked lettuce….but, maybe if I play my cards right,  I’ll get a smoking fun for my birthday.

Mad French Scientist in the House

 

The French play hard, or at least some French do. I have firsthand experience: our scuba instructor who on the first lesson just had us pitch ourselves overboard while he conducted a learn while doing lesson at a depth of 30 feet; a ski guide who was horrified that there were orange fences marking the crevasses on a glacier, he felt it marred the landscape. I thought a crevasse marker was a charming addition to my overall safety.
Last Friday morning, at the IACP conference, I met a new time of mad Frenchman: the Mad Scientist.
Herve' This  is the ‘father’ of molecular gastronomy; he is the only person to hold this doctorate. Google him up, his resume is endless.
On Friday, I believe his mission was to have us ask questions about how we cook, to be inquisitive, to be open to debunking or proving old wive’s tales and to always cook with love. Speaking in heavily accented English, he was a whirlwind of ideas, tossing them into the air and seeing what would happen next. Each concept led down the road to more and more questions.  His only book that is available in English is “Molecular Gastronomy Exploring the Science of Flavor.”  While you will learn some hard facts, like how to cook an egg, it’s more valuable as a tool to help you think about your cooking, and to understand why things happen.
Here are some of the ‘bon mots” that he tossed at us:
- He microwaved some eggs, which solidified them. As he held up the solid whites, he declared, “This is a miracle, better than the changing into the body of Christ.”
- “I trust nobody but the facts”
- “Is all this science useful? We are not beasts!”
- “Even chemists can smile”
- Regarding the current use of chemicals for altering natural food properties: “Should we use such products? Are we killing the guests?”
- “If a chef cannot make a stock, what can he make?”
- “Chocolate is fat! If you want to be slim with fat and chocolate, forget it!”
- “In the kitchen, flavor is the saint.”
- Debunking an old wives tale, “The mayonnaise will break if it is made in the presence of menstruating women. Is this true?”
- “Cooking. It is first love.”

His mind works so fast, it was difficult to keep pace. I had visions of harried assistants racing behind him, trying to catch his ideas, before he moved on to the next.
If you are interested in the science of cooking, taste, flavor, then make the effort and read his book.
The slide show at the top of this post are some of the slides used  at the presentation. For a thoroughly committed scientist, he apparently felt that proofreading was not as important as the concept…but, I’m sure you get the point!

Sous Vide and Singapore

Sous Vide Scary?

Back to sous vide: the process of sealing food in a vacuum-sealed pouch and then low temperature cooking it. The controversy or discussion of the other day was about consistency and a disregard for terroir.
Another aspect of sous vide is safety, at least in the eyes of NYC officials. As far as I can tell, NYC stands alone on the ban, which went into effect last March. NYC health officials claim there isn’t an outright ban, a restaurant can file a HACCP (Hazard Analysis and Critical Control Point), however that is an extremely costly and time consuming project for a restaurant that just wants to sous vide some lamb shanks. NYC seems to have jumped the gun and worried about the ‘possibility’ of food poisoning without any evidence of actual poisoning in a technique that has been used in France since the end of WWII, and in the U.S. for about 15 years.

High end, creative restaurants like WD-50 have been using the sous vide process to experiment with flavors and textures; it’s highly unlikely that the team at WD-50 would not take care to be sure their dishes hadn’t developed botulism.  Botulism can develop if the food product has been stored at too high a temperature and/or cooked at too low a temperature. But can’t the same be said about just about any food product? You leave the fresh fish on the counter all day, you are going to have  a problem.
Which makes me wonder: has NYC’s Mayor Bloomberg gone all Singapore dictator on us? What is with all these food bans? Trans Fats. Foie Gras. Sous Vide. Even morel mushrooms in LA.   OK, each one has very separate issues and should probably not be lumped together.  But, it seems as if we are looking at a trend. 
And now for the next question: Why do we still allow Smithfield  to process pork in such an obviously disastrous way, but we get twitchy about foie gras?  Why do we allow our cows to be fed feed that produce e.coli not only in the meat but inside the spinach that we eat? 
And on a more philosophical note:  Hamburgers have to be cooked to death to be served to the public, so that we can kill off all that e.coli.  Why aren’t we addressing the source of the problem: contaminated meat processors, instead of adjusting our tastebuds to the charms of charred cardboard?

Sous Vide

At it’s simplest, cooking something in the ‘sous vide’ manner, means to cook something in plastic. In practice, the food is vacuum packed, sealed in plastic, and then cooked at low temperatures.   It’s a hot buzz word in restaurants right now, for a few reasons: a) sealing and intensifying flavors, b) protecting against loss (for example: cooking foie gras sous vide can reduce loss by 5%, and at the cost of foie gras, that becomes important)  c) consistency.

In the fall issue of Gastronomica, a quarterly magazine dedicated to all aspects of gastronomy, Scott Haas makes a case for sous vide in an article entitled “Better Dining through Chemistry”.  Gastronomica does not have an online version of this article, so I cannot link to.

Although there is controversy regarding the food safety aspect of the technique, Mr. Haas is exploring the commercial benefits of sous vide.  He states, “The big economic advantage of sous vide method is that it enables chefs to create brands. Whether a signature dish at a restaurant or a specific item sold in retail stores, food prepared sous vide makes it possible for enterprising chefs to maintain a global presence. Alain Ducasse can serve a sous vide chicken dish at his restaurant in Tokyo that tastes exactly the same as the one served at his Paris restaurant.”
I have one word, no make that three words to say to that: “Howard Johnson” “terroir”. Why on earth would I shell out big bucks to have a chicken taste the same in Tokyo or Paris? That just makes no sense at all.  Howard Johnson became the powerhouse that it was because it was the same everywhere, no matter where you went; you could expect the comfort of familiarity and sameness. It’s a successful business model used by the likes of  Holiday Inn, Ritz Carlton, and Stouffer’s, and that international giant: McDonald’s. But why would Alain Ducasse, a Frenchman, want to join that club, and why would he ignore terroir?  Quality winemakers strive to make their wines taste of the ground, the minerals, the rainwater. Their wine can be produced nowhere else, and that creates value. Why would a chef turn his back on the unique appeal of a regional ingredient?

Mr. Haas goes on to explain the benefits of ‘uniformity’. “Because minute variations in temperature can yield extremely subtle differences, by precisely documenting the desired temperatures and cooking times, chefs can be assured of the identical result every time, as though they were in a scientific laboratory.” 
He quotes Philip Preston, president of PolyScience, as saying, “It makes cooking idiot proof.” PolyScience makes equipment for sous vide processing.  OK, so let me get this straight: I go to a high end restaurant and I want the consistency of product that I get at McDonald’s, prepared by people who have the same skill level.  And that is supposed to be a good thing??

I can understand the appeal of using this method for sealing in flavor and moisture, but consistency and brand building seem directly opposed to the reasons why I would choose to spend my hard earned money at Per Se, where upwards of 20% of the dishes are prepared sous vide.

The health department controversy …. Well, that’s for another day.

The weather in the mountains is absurdly, strangely warm for the second day. As we were coming home, the wind coming up the valley was balmy.  And back east, they are in a deep freeze.  Bizarre weather for sure.  Here is a photo of a little friend who was eating breakfast with me this morning.  A dude if every there was one!