In any field of endeavor, there are standard works that most serious devotees would be familiar with. For example, in computer science, most serious geeks have read Donald Knuth, or for the project management types, DeMarco and Lister. In advertising (at least in the past), it may have been David Ogilvy’s “Confessions of an Advertising Man”. In cooking, the canon is not completely defined, but there is certainly a broad selection of works that would qualify: Escoffier, Kamman, Child, and Beard come to mind as fairly non-controversial selections. But what if you want to tune in to the Church of What’s Happening Now? You hear so much about what chef is doing what with this ingredient of the week, but unless you can go to
Before I give you an answer (and please note, gentle reader, that I said “an” answer and not “the” answer), let me tell you about a seemingly orthogonal, yet related thread. I promise to bring it around.
When I was in software, the development that excited me most had to be the Open Source Movement, mostly for its value of the open and wide dissemination of knowledge. I saw the developers I worked with do great things with Open Source Software, often solving problems with solutions that had been developed by other developers with similar problems. If we had been forced to come up with a solution on our own from scratch, it would have resulted in deliverables that would have sorely disappointed people (“Yes, I know that there are no obvious features for customers, but you should see the custom code my team had to develop to handle and solve all our session management challenges. It’s elegant as all get out.” That’s the kind of stuff that can get you killed in a corporate environment — completely necessary, but often transparent to users). But in Open Source Software, the contributions of untold numbers of peoples’ knowledge, analysis, bug fixing, inspiration — so much of that included directly in their code and documentation. And it was there, for you to build upon and to solve your own challenges with. Amazing.
Which brings me around to the site that should absolutely be one of your RSS subscriptions and consequently, daily reads: Ideas in Food, the weblog of Aki Kamozawa and H. Alexander Talbot. (Interestingly, they are both alums of Clio, Ken Oringer’s amazing restaurant in Boston. For me, it is probably THE restaurant that changed my worldview on food.) It is astounding what these folks do on a daily basis. Essentially, it is an open journal of their experiments with food. For example, their entry on their Black Pepper Puree was spellbinding. Recently, I had been thinking about pressure-cooking and its applications for speeding up braises and the like. And then I read Ideas in Food and my head explodes. It’s great to have people provoke you in this manner — hey, dude, open your mind…now think…what does a pressure cooker do? Sure, it speeds cooking by raising the boiling point of water, but beyond that…what kinds of things have intense flavors that could be unlocked by pressure-cooking? And what would they do on Ideas in Food?:
“I loaded the pressure cooker with some peppercorns, salt, water and sugar. We cooked the mixture for about twenty minutes and then let the cooker cool. When I opened it up we had some tenderized peppercorns and a viscous black pepper infused and stained syrup. Since my initial idea was to make a puree of peppercorns, I loaded up the blender and let it rip.”
YES! So cool. That single thing gives me so many ideas. And so it goes.
Kamozawa and Talbot effectively post their notebooks, showing the evolution of their ideas, simply pages and pages of ideas ready to be expanded on. Open Source Cooking. Perhaps we could start a movement? Take a look at just one of them — it’s like drinking from a fire-hose of ideas. And we are all better for it.
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