tartare

German Molecular Gastronomist Looses Hands

According to the UK Telegraph, a 24-year old German man lost both hands and very nearly his life in a liquid hydrogen accident.  The details are a bit sketchy, though there is little doubt that liquid nitrogen has to be handled with care. 

While often attributed to so-called "molecular gastrononmists", using LN2 for food preparation has been around at least since 1885. 

Flavor Pairings

It's a crazy week -- May and June are insane months for caterers, so much so that I am considering starting a petition drive to have both months combined into one ugly 60-day month called "Helldorado".  Blogging may be fits and starts this week. 

<elegant segue to next topic would have gone here>

So, the next few posts are going to be about new flavor pairing ideas and I was hoping people might want to play along using the home version of the game.  You can get a really good start with the excellent tool (with the curious name of) Foodpairing.  You know that parmesan cheese goes well with tomatoes, but did you ever expect it may work with chocolate or banana?  More about the underlying science in a future post, but in the mean time, enjoy the inspiration that comes from the unexpected.  Pick out something you like and make a dish using some radical departures from what you may usually do. 

Where To Buy Activa RM (Transglutaminase)

As far as getting questions from folks, by far the one I receive the most is: "Where do you buy transglutaminase?"

Try here: L'Epicerie or here: Le Sanctuaire

Chadzilla's Sous Vide Salmon Technique

Two great discoveries here:
1) Chadzilla. I don't remember how I was linked over there; perhaps an Ideas in Food piece.  Some great stuff there, such as
2) his experimentation in finding the perfect sous vide salmon brine.

New Alinea Cookbook On The Way

In the fashion of El Bulli, Grant Achatz and team have written a new cookbook revealing the techniques and ingredient combinations of four seasonal menus from Alinea. An pre-order of the book will set you back fifty dollars, but will also get you an autographed book and access to a special extended content website, Alinea Mosaic. The website access precedes the late fall 2008 book shipment. Will I be ordering? Color me ordered.
What other industry has folks that will sell you their research and development this cheaply? Amazing.

http://www.alinea-book.com/

Flatiron Steaks Redux

Well, I became so involved in the flatiron steaks that I forgot to take pictures. No matter; I am going to repeat the process and this time it will be easy to be more deliberate and get the documentary work done.

Some plusses and deltas for the first transglutaminase experiment:

Plusses:
1) Wearing latex gloves -- good idea. It might be overkill, but you may want to wear a mask also. I know, you say "I'll never breathe it in"; however, I have heard some folks say the same thing about the utility of seat belts.
2) Working with fresh ingredients -- it seems to me that one of the main virtues of a piece of meat as opposed to ground or chopped meat, be it ground beef or tartare, is this: the more surface area you expose, the more opportunities there are for microbial growth. When you cut a piece of meat apart and restructure it, the possible places that bacteria could grow increase.

Deltas:
1) Take pictures this time -- while the process isn't as interesting as one might hope for (frankly, it is a whole lot like dredging), it is still helpful to see how someone else does something. It gives a great edge in mental preparations.
2) Get adequate coverage -- where I was simply reassembling slices of flatiron steak along one plane (such as the bottom of one slice and the top of another), my results were great. When I assembled a number of pieces, it seemed I hadn't adequately covered the meat. The bottom was sealed, but the sides were not.
3) More pressure -- cans in the fridge aren't enough. For my first batch, I followed this process: After applying transglutaminase (Activa), I wrapped the meat tightly in saran wrap and then under a pan weighted down by cans. I think the future best practice would be to place reassembled product in a vacuum bag. This would be an easy way of getting the compression to support the bonding.

End result? I grilled two reassembled flatirons tonight, plus a small roulade piece left over from trimming. The verdict? Delicious. The lovely and talented C was my objective judge (she would not hesitate to say "funky" and not eat something). We found the steaks to have a great, gristle-free texture and wonderfully "beefy" taste. Delightful.

So, hold me to this: I will have the entire process documented and photographed within a few days.

Flatiron Steaks: Disassembled and Back Again

So, with the semester winding down and exams being over on Thursday, I should have more time to post. And this one, well, it has been a long time coming. I have some lovely Activa from Ajinomoto, just looking for trouble and I am going to reshape some flatiron steaks.

Flatiron steaks, if you are not familiar, come from an interesting piece of meat, the first-cut of the blade-cut chuck roast. Sure, it's technically from the chuck, but it is also very much adjacent to the rib and more specifically, the rib-eye, my favorite steak from the venerable steer. There are three cuts available from this piece, and the top one, when boned out from the blade bone, is known as the flatiron. It is not what you'd expect from the chuck. In fact, some say that this is the second most flavorful cut of beef.

So, what's the hitch? Why might not the name of this cut be on your lips, in your bas-cart every time you buy groceries?

Despite its distinctive beef flavor, the cut has a NASTY piece of gristle that passes through it. If you don't know that, you might buy and cook one, only to determine that it's not worth the trouble. If you know the piece is there, you trim it out and you are left with two smaller pieces of meat. But what about fabricating them into something bigger, like a good, solid steak for a meat lover? Maybe, I could augment the steak with a nice injection of bacon (which I think I remember from an Art Culinaire...not sure, I'll check tomorrow. Always acknowledge your resources and influences).

Thus, comes the Activa. I'll write this up when I'm done, and if I am not too preoccupied, I'll have detailed pictures from the process.

And then, what to make with them?

UPDATE: I looked through my back issues of Art Culinaire and I found Wylie Dufresne's "Flat Iron Steak with Celery Noodles and Celery Root Ricotta" in the Spring '06 issue, but in that preparation he forms the steaks into a roll and poaches them.

There are two reasons that I am glad I went back to look this up:
1) Even if cooking techniques don't (and thank goodness, shouldn't) represent the kind of intellectual property protected by copyrights and the like, isn't it sporting and proper to cite where you get ideas from?

2) Call it serendipity, but since we are on the subject of acknowledging influences, on the facing page in that issue of Art Culinaire is Dufresne's "Green Eggs and Ham", a post-modern play on a fried egg, with celery "yolks", coconut "whites", and actual bacon. This is the style of dish that Top Chef runner-up Marcel Vigneron was accused of ripping off from Dufresne for a recent Wired Magazine piece. Vigneron's piece is certainly derivative (and not as appetizing in appearance as the WD-50 concoction); however, I think Marcel more frequently apes Ferran Adrià, especially from El Bulli 1998-2002. The calcium chloride/sodium alginate "caviar" and the ubiquitous "espuma" (at least for Vigneron, who doesn't seem to be able to make a dish without foam) are flat-out Adrià.

This all makes me think of The Smiths song "Cemetery Gates":

"If you must write prose and poems
The words you use should be your own
Don't plagiarise or take "on loans"
There's always someone, somewhere
With a big nose, who knows
And who trips you up and laughs
When you fall"

Is Marcel a plagiarist? I don't know. But if he had only acknowledged his influences...

The Canon Is Being Written Daily

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 to try the aforementioned chef's cuisine, where do you go? I have some great ingredients, but I want to really take that left at Albequerque...now what do I do?

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.

Activa for Fun and Profit

I couldn't be more excited. Thursday, upon returning to Rancho Deluxe corporate HQ, I found a nice box from Ajinomoto Food Ingredients containing some sample size packages of their Activa RM and Activa FP transglutaminase preparations.

Transglutaminase is an enzyme that is used in commercial food production (ever wonder how McDonald's or Banquet comes up with some of those shaped chicken pieces?). In addition, it has been used to more uplifting and original effect by modern chefs such as Aki Kamozawa & H. Alexander Talbot, Heston Blumenthal and Wylie Dufresne, among others. Wylie Dufresne refers to the substance as "meat glue" and that is probably the most concise description that you will find.

Essentially, transglutaminase (or "Activa") can cause pieces of meat or seaood to cling together, forming protein bonds as if the pieces had, perhaps, oringinally been together. Of course, the pieces can be of any size. For example, Dufresne has made noodles of puréed shrimp with the shrimp content at about 90%, all thanks to transglutaminase.

I have a list of cooking experiments coming up and Activa just popped to the top of the list. I will detail the experiments and the results in a future post.