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Chefs As Chemists
circletimessquare writes "Using ingredients usually relegated to the lower half of the list of ingredients on a Twinkies wrapper, some professional chefs are turning themselves into magicians with food. Ferran Adrià in Spain and Heston Blumenthal in England have been doing this for years, but the New York Times updates us on the ongoing experiments at WD-50 in New York City. Xanthan Gum, agar-agar, and other hydrocolloids are being used to bring strange effects to your food. Think butter that doesn't melt in the oven, foie gras you can tie into knots, and fried mayonnaise."
from http://khymos.org/recipe-collection.php
...fried mayonnaise.
I have a couple friends that went into food chemistry after undergrad. I thought about it but decided to stick with organic chemisty.
Gone!
Heston Blumenthal's Kitchen Chemistry series (which unfortunately didn't make it) was a lot more interesting than this article. You can even find torrents of the pilot episodes. I wish that series had been picked up and continued because there were some very interesting subjects, like the reasons behind certain flavours simply being unable to mix (basil and coffee, for example) as well as an everyman's guide to how the chemistry worked. As innovative as Blumenthal can be, there's no way I'm shelling out £300 for a meal at his restaurant.
and immediately tried to brew basil coffee, right?
What sound do people on rollercoasters make? Hint: it's not Xbox 360.
I have to say that this is why I like watching Alton Brown's Good Eats. He actually understands the science of cooking, and is able to explain how it works without turning off the average person.
I'm betting "molecular gastronomy" is going to REALLY take off within the next five years or so...
Don't tell me to get a life. I'm a gamer; I have LOTS of lives!
Here and I thought that molecular gastronomy was a way for my kids to detect when they shouldn't come into the same room, by noticing what I ate at the restaurant.
Hello all,
Currently I'm doing the Chef part of my life at this time. What is being described here is very old stuff http://www.foodarts.com/ and all this stuff is just commonplace technique nowadays. Adria, Achatz, Andres I have met or worked with. It's really not that amazing when you think that we as culinarians are (actually they are), just being creative instead of the things that a lot of people have been eating all along but in a different form. For instance: Grant Achatz (whom i think is Awesome) guinness that's thickened with Gelatin is just "Jello" "tm" but flavored with beer. Ferran Adria is the guy you seek if you want to know/learn stuff He invented this whole thing in first place about 10 or 12 years ago and it took the world by storm. He makes drops of olive encase in suger bags. Hell, there is a gut in chicago that invented a computer printer that makes edible and taste-infused menu's that you eat to before you order your food: http://en.wikinews.org/wiki/Chicago_chef_invents_edible_menu. Anyway, my whole point is: We as chefs, are very creative, funny and dedicated to bring the food world into the computer world accepept as munchies on a late night!
I'm here for the experience, not the Hyperbole.
They were delicious!
What?
Okay, hands up those who read that as WD-40.
Ok, it may not kill you right away and it may have calories, but I don't consider that edible.
Sounds worse than McDonald's to me. Yuck.
thegodmovie.com - watch it
Eh, no worse than chopping them into serving size pieces.
Life feeds on life. This is necessary.
Slashdot - where whining about luck is the new way to make the world you want.
just a side thought: i think animal rights activists should be the most pro-genetically modified special interest group in the world. reason being, if you could genetically engineer foie gras in vats, or animal flesh, you would:
1. feed all of the carnivores, more cheaply, and with less environmental impact
2. not harm a single feeling conscious (cue the sad violins) beautiful harmless loving animal. it would be just tissue in vats you were harvesting
of course things like mouthfeel, taste, etc. would need to be technologically refined over time. at first you would be making nothing better than spam. real gastromes would talk about the consistency of the flesh and the subtle flavors based on diet. but you could gradually, over time, approach a meat source that defies the experts to tell the difference from real meat
however, you get the usual luddite reaction from animal rights activists: stop eating meat in the name of cruelty, stop GM food because it's an abomination
yeah, right
animal rights activists are an abomination: eating meat is perfectly natural
animal rights activists should meld their artificial morality (it's certainly impossible in the natural world, outside of civilization) with artifical genetic engineering, and create the nirvana of an animal never harmed
you really think it's harder to do that than convince carnivores to stop eating meat?
path of least resistance friends. animal rights activists: pool your money, and get going with the GM startup
intellectual property law is philosophically incoherent. it is your moral duty to ignore it or sabotage it
The technique is generally referred to as "molecular gastronomy", and has produced even weirder things than listed in the main article. For example, Dufresne has used "meat glue" (i.e. transglutaminase, which was, IIRC, designed to produce Chicken McNuggets) to make pasta entirely out of shrimp, and another chef has made flavoured edible menus out of soybean and potato starch with fruit and vegetable inks that come in such varieties as steak and sushi. Here's a page with some interesting links on Chow:
http://www.chow.com/stories/10411
you really think it's harder to do that than convince carnivores to stop eating meat?
Humans are omnivores, not carnivores.
On a side note, your little tirade didn't really seem to address the point the GP was making: Do we really need to torture animals before killing & eating them?
There are shills on slashdot. Apparently, I'm one of them.
Think butter that doesn't melt in the oven, foie gras you can tie into knots, and fried mayonnaise.
... and I especially don't want to think too much about fried mayonnaise. Cripes, talk about adding insult to injury.
I don't want to think about butter that doesn't melt in the oven, or foie gras in knots
The higher the technology, the sharper that two-edged sword.
Not that much worse than what non-free range chickens go through. Ever seen what a large scale chicken farm is like?
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kq77ET5af5U
While I don't really like how animals are treated in large scale farms, I don't think vegetarianism is really the answer. People need a little bit of respect for the things they put in their bodies. Maybe eat a little less meat and buy from local farmers who raise and slaughter their own livestock. It is probably a little bit better for you, and actually has taste (especially chicken).
09 F9 11 02 9D 74 E3 5B D8 41 56 C5 63 56 88 C0 is the magic number.
looking at the blog referenced, there are possibly more interesting meals (and much better pics)
El Bulli (referenced in the comments above too - lots of crazy looking stuff)
http://chuckeats.com/blog3/2006/06/22/el-bulli-roses-spain-the-mad-scientist/
Keyah Grande (looks stunning)
http://chuckeats.com/blog3/2007/01/19/keyah-grande-pagosa-springs-co-rip/
El Poblet (i'm not sure of the techniques used but it looks wild)
http://chuckeats.com/blog3/2007/10/08/el-poblet-denia-spain-a-midsummer-nights-dream/
For some reason, this is the first thing that popped into my head when I read TFA.
Have gnu, will travel.
What a despicable thing to do to an animal just to make it tastier to eat.
The photos of tubes being put down the throats of ducks certainly look horrific, but animal rights activists have a tendency to over-dramatize things. From an article in Time magazine:
http://www.time.com/time/arts/article/0,8599,1669732,00.html
The debate is centered on the practice of gavage, in which corn is force-fed to farm-raised ducks through a funnel down their throats. Some argue that gavage is inhumane, while others counter that the physiology of a duck is not the same as a human. "It seems terrible if you don't know that a duck's esophagus is lined with a very thick cuticle, if you don't realize that baby ducks are fed by their mother pushing her beak down the baby's throat," says Ariane Daguin, owner of D'Artagnan, the largest foie gras purveyor in the U.S. Recent studies by Dr. Daniel Guémené, a leading expert on the physiological effects of gavage, have shown that ducks with young in the wild were under more stress than the ducks being fed through gavage. And both The American Veterinary Medical Association's House of Delegates and the American Association of Avian Pathologists have concluded that foie is not a product of animal cruelty.
Also, here's an abstract of research by Guémené:
http://www.edpsciences.org/articles/animres/pdf/2001/02/faure.pdf
The debate on welfare issues related to the force feeding of ducks and geese involves understanding the reactions of the animals to the force feeding process. Two types of experiment were performed. Ducks and geese were trained to be fed in a pen 8 metres away from their rearing pen and were then force fed in the feeding pen. The hypothesis was that if force feeding caused aversion, the animals would not spontaneously go to the test pen. There were some signs of aversion in ducks, but not full avoidance, and there were no signs of aversion in geese. In another experiment, the flight distances of ducks from the person who performed the force feeding and from an unknown observer were measured. Ducks avoided the unknown person more than the force feeder. Their avoidance of the force feeder decreased during the force feeding period. There was no development of aversion to the force feeder during the force feeding process.
But I would suggest that if you eat a hamburger for lunch and wear leather shoes or a belt, you might want to do a hypocrisy check and see what your score is.
Sanity check time. Eating a cow isn't the same as force feeding a goose until its liver basically explodes so that it's extra tasty.
I spent a large portion of my childhood on a farm and have been through the whole cycle from feeding the calf to walking the adult cow in to get slaughtered. I have absolutely no problem with eating meat, hunting (provided it's done for food or to rid oneself of threats to land and crops, etc. I don't condone pure trophy hunting), and the like. In fact, I've done/do all of them myself.
That said, I can't condone the torture of an animal just because you think engorging its liver will make it yummy. If you raise something for food, treat it with respect, and when it comes time to kill it, make it a clean kill. Doing otherwise shows a lack of respect for the things which keep you alive and, by extension, a lack of respect for yourself.
(Oh, and I wear leather too. Quite a lot of it - coat, belts, several pairs of gloves, multiple pairs of shoes and boots, etc - and I view that as a positive thing. It means that one more part of the animal that helped feed someone gets used toward a positive end instead of being thrown away).
Everything I need to know I learned by killing smart people and eating their brains.
that is, sex with a real child, who is biologically sexually immature. you can bet your archeologist's tenured chair that our ancestors thousands of years ago were bashing the heads of men (and women) who preyed on the prepubescent
meanwhile, teenagers are biologically mature enough for sex. now in modern times, certainly, the issue of TEENAGERS being verboten for sex with adults is a new thing. but that's because we respect the notion of mental immaturity nowadays. so let them experiment amongst themselves, and keep the predatorial adults away from them
seems like progress to me
intellectual property law is philosophically incoherent. it is your moral duty to ignore it or sabotage it
Probably the best show on the Food Network. Alton Brown's show gives me the impression that Alton's a physics major that happened to get into cooking.
What an ill-informed statement. Here's a few facts about this so-called "despicable" treatment: 1. Ducks (and geese) are not human. Things that might be uncomfortable to one species are perfectly fine to others. Anthropomorphism is bad, mmm-kay? 2. Ducks (and geese) are designed with a crop, no gag reflex, and an esophagus that is lined with stuff similar to what our fingernails are made of. Why? Because thy are designed to swallow really freaking huge things... like live fish that are flipping around with their tails still protruding from the bird's mouth. Does the bird care? Of course not... it will digest it when it's damn good and ready. 3. Migratory birds are designed to store *tremendous* amounts of fat prior to migration. They do NOT store fat on their hips and thighs (remember the anthropomorphism thing in note #1...). These birds store fat in their liver... it's what they do. It's not "diseased", it's simply stored. Once they stop eating and begin migrating, the fat is used, and the liver goes back to normal. Except, birds on foie gras farms aren't allowed to migrate, for obvious reasons. 4. Commercial chicken farms are far more cruel than foie gras farms, except you don't ever see people picketing restaurants trying to ban the serving of chicken. Odd. 5. There is a direct correlation between the amount of stress on a bird raised for foie gras and the quality of the foie that's produced. The result of this is that modern production methods pretty much dictate that the birds are treated like royalty during their rather brief lives. At Hudson Valley Foie Gras, for instance, once a person has been assigned as the feeder for a group of birds, that person is the *ONLY* person that can touch them... switching the person who is responsible for them just stresses the birds out. Bottom line: when I come back, I hope it's as a foie gras duck, because it pretty much guarantees that I'll live like a rock star, and then die young. Isn't that all anybody really wants? 6. Sheeple that regurgiate PETA bullshit should be thrown off a cliff, because their lack of ability to apply their own critical thinking to a situation is a big part of the reason common sense is being bred out of our gene pool. 7. I just got home from a 6-course foie gras dinner. It was orgasmic. Thanks. Carry on.
Enzymes, being proteins, aren't normally absorbed by the body. (Which is why insulin, for example, can't be taken in tablet form.) Also, these enzymes aren't supposed to be floating around in the blood (which is where they'd be if they were absorbed) - Liver function tests measure the presence of these enzymes in the blood, since they show that liver cells have been damaged/lysed, releasing their contents.
Vitamin A deficiency is still a big problem in developing countries, though, and liver is definitely the best source of it. Of course, too much of a good thing can also be a problem.
Of all tyrannies, a tyranny sincerely exercised for the (supposed) good of its victims may be the most oppressive
"Foie gras is comparable to chopping up an animal into serving size pieces - while it's still alive."
It's not comparable at all. The geese willingly go to get themselves stuffed with food (google). It might not be healthy for them, but whether they get fattened or not they're going to get slaughtered in the end anyway. The farm definitely won't want any of them to die prematurely either.
AFAIK, plenty of people willingly queue up to supersize their meals and themselves.
As for slaughterhouses being shut down, people should be asking why there's so much salmonella and e. coli about - it's because of really crappy practices. Telling people to cook their contaminated meat thoroughly so that it's safe to eat is avoiding the real issue on why there's so much "shit" in/on the meat (or even vegetables) in the first place. The regulators allow unsafe practices and shift the problem to the consumers.
We kill 9 billion chickens in the US every year. 9 BILLION. Our selective breeding is so effective that meat chickens go from birth to slaughter in about 8 weeks.
The meat and poultry industry is a nasty, nasty business. Any illusion that we treat meat animals with any sort of dignity goes out the door when you learn how fiendishly optimized the whole affair is.
It is a peculiar thing that we think it's OK to eat animals. I eat meat because it's acceptable to do so in my culture and because I like the taste. I make no claims of moral righteousness. If you're not willing to face up to what needs to happen to get you your meat, you shouldn't be eating meat. I absolutely respect vegetarians (I know several) and particularly vegans for the choice they have made. It is not my choice, but it is one that I can easily justify.
When you really, really get down to it, there's little more inhumane than the breeding of animals for the sole purpose of their later slaughter. How we treat the animals has ramifications for our safety and health, and it is often the most graphic effect of the system. It does not, however, have much to do with the morality of the situation.
In essence, when we have billions of animals created essentially as expendable meat factories, force feeding a few geese seems like small potatoes.
-certain- things must be just-so, others can be experimented with without ill effects, or easily be corrected if you get off-track. The reason cooking is hard for beginners is that they're not aware of which things belong in which category, so they stress the stuff that isn't actually that critical, or are too sloppy on the few spots where you really need to do it -JUST- so, or both.
If you're making bread it -matters- if the temperature of your liquids is 30C, 38C or 50C. If you're making lasagne it does -not- matter, well theoretically you may need to leave it for 3 minutes longer in the oven... If you triple the amount of chili in your chili con carne the result may be non-edible for non-dragons, if you triple the amount of estragon on your pizza, you get sligthly-more-estragony pizza, nobody will even really notice. (it'll taste a bit different, but not inedible, probably not even bad)
If you're making buns, they'll in general (up to a point anyway) be better if you work the dough more vigorously, perhaps letting them rise multiple times with workings of the dough between. To the contrary, if you're making any kind of sponge-cake where the airness comes from beaten eggs, then you should stir as little as absolutely humanly possible after adding the flour, since otherwise you'll beat-out all the airiness.
So, in short, cooking ain't in general hard at all. There's certain details that you need to pay attention to. It takes some practice or teaching or both to learn which, precisely, that is. You probably need to mess up these things a few times to really learn them. Most people I know have tried the trick of baking pizza with too-warm water once -- most people don't need to do that more than once to get the idea....
A friend of mine is an excellent chef (mediterranean/mexican fusion with emphasis on seafood), regularly invited to prepare meals in places like Oslo, Paris, London, Evian (Switzerland), San Francisco, Acapulco, etc. No matter what city it is, he splurges on at least one meal at the most celebrated restaurant (according to the gastronomic insiders) in town, and money is no object on these special occasions.
A couple of years ago, while visiting London, my friend and his wife went to Blumenthal's place, The Fat Duck, specifically for the sampler meal at three hundred pounds per person, for two people. Sixteen tiny courses, fifteen of them with their own specific wine.
Just to give you an idea, the first course was a sphere chilled to the temperature of liquid nitrogen, handled with chemist's pliers. Within a second of being popped in the mouth, the sphere vaporized and expanded. Containing mostly gas, with some green tea, lemon and vodka, this did three things: cleansed the taste buds, stimulated the appetite and gave an immediate buzz.
Supposedly, the fourth or fifth course was the proverbial sledgehammer to the head - a quail jelly on a bed of green pea puree and wheat. That's when the sky cracked open and the meaning of life was telepathically revealed from above. After that it was a two-hour haze of "artistic perfection".
How many of us can say that a certain meal, a sequence of flavor combinations, caused a full-blown epiphany, a mystical experience?
To this day, my friend's eyes glaze and focus off into infinity while remembering "the best meal I've ever had in my life, the best twelve hundred dollars (!!!) I've ever spent". The good wife agrees, even as the Harrod's shopping budget was obliterated by one dinner.
Lil' Thindime, lilting a lacrimose lament, krashes the kwaint konfines of Kokonino Kounty
Highly intelligent grapes were crushed while still alive to make that wine. Bastard.
echo -e 'global _start\n _start:\n mov eax, 2\n int 80h\n jmp _start' > a.asm; nasm a.asm -f elf; ld a.o -o a;
Mmmm... panda-burgers...
I mean... come on people.
Humans have always been eating other animals.
You know... being the top of the food chain has its responsibilities as well.
If we stuck to what fell of the tree... well... lets just say that Marky Mark and Charlton Heston would not call this place their home.
Instead, human ancestors ate meat.
Whenever they could get their greedy little hands on it. And that tasty protein made them stronger, bigger, smarter hunters.
After a while, they became so smart they realised - "Why the fuck should I run after these animals whenever I need food? Lets capture some of them, put them in some kind of a fence and keep them there for later eating."
Tortured? Dude, we used to bash their heads with rocks and sticks.
And we didn't even bother to feed them and take care of them for years before that.
We would just sneak up on them, and then 10-20 of us would start throwing rocks at it.
Many times we would just hurt it a lot, and it would run away to die from the wounds while we went for other, slower pray.
Get the ancestors of today's cows and ask them if they would rather have it the old way, or would they have it like their relatives today?
I already know what they would say.
They would say: MOOOO!!!
Mit der Dummheit kämpfen Götter selbst vergebens
It sounds like you've just described most activities that people outside those activities find hard.
Auto mechanics ain't in general hard at all. It's just knowing which nuts and bolts to undo, in which order, and on which part.
Assembling one's own computer ain't in general hard at all. It's just knowing which parts are compatible with which parts, plugging components into each other, and knowing when you are in danger of frying a component due to static electricity and when you aren't.
It reminds me of an anecdote I've heard attributed to Henry Ford but couldn't find after an exhaustive 30 second search on Google. Henry had some equipment that was malfunctioning, and his engineers couldn't figure out what was wrong. He decided to call in the guy, let's call him Bill, who had designed the equipment. Bill spent 45 minutes working on the equipment, got it working, and left. A couple weeks later Henry received an invoice from Bill for $10,000. Henry called Bill up and said, "I know your time is valuable, but don't you think $10k is a little much for twirling a few knobs and bolts?". Bill agreed and said he'd adjust the bill. Henry got an adjusted bill soon afterwards that said, "Adjusting a few knobs and bolts: $1000. Knowing which knobs and bolts to adjust: $9000."
So I've babbled on enough, and I agree with you that once you get into cooking, much of it isn't that daunting, but neither are most other pastimes once you've figured them out.
www.clarke.ca
Assuming the order is greatest quantity first, woukd you expect the actual food to be in the top half?
Only three things are certain; death, taxes, and apocryphal quotations - Ben Franklin.
We FORCE chickens to live in pens. Some chickens are FORCED to live in small cages. We FORCE cows to take hormones and antibiotics so they can produce more milk than is natural without becoming diseased. We FORCE veal calves to live in small cages. We FORCE sheep to be sheared. We FORCE cattle, chicken and other animals into corrals for slaughter. We FORCE electricity through their heads, or FORCE bolts into their heads or force cleavers or saws through their necks to kill them for processing.
See, this is what eating meat is all about: FORCING animals to do certain things so that we can eat their flesh, milk and eggs and use their by-products. Just because people look at gavage and say, "that must really hurt the animal," doesn't make it so. In fact, from all evidence available, it isn't detrimental to the animals' health. It certainly doesn't cause "exploding livers" as one poster put it.
In light of all this, it is absolutely relevant that foie gras animals are treated better than the average chicken raised for meat. We force animals to do a lot of things and from all evidence available, forced slaughter is still the most detrimental to the animal.
This "issue" is simply an attempt by animal rights extremists to open the door to further limits on society's ability to use and eat animals (even keep them as pets). It is a gateway issue for them. Don't be suckered into their little games.
Taft
"Force feeding" is a bit of a misnomer. It's more like "assisted feeding".
Here's the thing... after the duck has been feed using gavage, they will typically go around and pick up any pieces of corn that have dropped on the floor and eat that too. The farmers are simply using technology to improve the efficiency of the process... left to their own devices, the ducks would "force feed" themselves without any help from us. Like I said before - quality of the product is inversely proportional to the stress that the animal is under. It is not in the farmer's best interest to stress these ducks out.
That story is actually attributed to the famous G.E. Electrical Engineer Charles Steinmetz, and the story was told by Charles Vest as part of the 1999 MIT commencement address.
I can't guarantee that the story is true, but that's where it's from.
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