It’s 6:15am and I’m in the Montreal airport. This is much too early to be writing about sous vide machines, centrifuges, siphons and rotary evaporators in any intelligent way. Is there a time for that?
According to the authors of Modernist Cuisine it is. Maybe I’ll ask them that tomorrow when I arrive at the Cooking Lab in Bellevue, Washington to help out and experiment for a week. There may be some standard chopping like any kitchen, but there will also be machines that whirl food faster than the Round-Up at Thomas Amusements in St. John’s (for those not from St. John’s or the Atlantic provinces, Round-Up was the rickety old ride that spins you around in a circle while you stand up holding the bars in front of you. You’re not locked in and it’s only the centrifugal force that keeps you from falling out. Basically you’re like the pea butter that the Cooking Lab splits into fat, juice and fibre, except the Round-Up is too old and too slow to turn you into anything interesting and/or delicious. Yes, the Cooking Lab will be just like my mom’s favourite falling apart amusement park ride, but better).
That is, if I can find the Lab. I’m going to do a call-out on twitter and see if someone from Modernist Cuisine gets back to me. I think the address is 3150 139th Ave SE, Building 4, which is where the food/cooking/cookbooks, “Modernist Cuisine” (and more recently, “Modernist Cuisine at Home”) were published – so says the internet. Besides the books, the lab also has a ton of patents pending for healthier snack foods and packaged things. The idea is to come up with ingenious food that has more nutrients that other shelf products. Well, that’s one idea. Another is to come up with multi-course tasting dinners involving sous vide meat and spherified sweet and savoury caviar. I wonder how much calcium chloride the Lab goes through in a week? How much sodium alginate?
Then they do tastings at major music festivals, which are the farmers markets of the rock world (e.g. Bumbershoot this Saturday). High-end samplings of what immersion circulators can do with beef. Me, I’m hoping to try that pistachio ice cream that’s naturally dairy free (it’s just pistachio oil and pistachio paste – ground pistachios – with sugar, water, and some emulsifiers, homogenized and then whipped in a paco jet until it’s smooth as butter), but also try other nuts. What about sunflower seed ice cream? That’s more Canadian. How about peach caviar? How about soup broth that never boils but cooks down to intense flavour? And what is the ideal temperature and time for cooking leafy swiss chard greens in an immersion circulator (or down-scale home version sous vide supreme or supreme demi) to retain the most nutrients?
These questions and more, to be answered. So I’ll be posting during the week with pictures of my own home creations while I was testing a Sous Vide Supreme Demi from Cedarlane Culinary in Ontario, and photos from the Cooking Lab as it’s all happening. The Supreme Demi is the home version of the immersion cooker. (Says my chef friend, it can’t be called a sous vide machine, because the actual “under vacuum” part is the vacuum sealing machine that looks like a three-hold punch, not the machine you fill with water. And it’s not a circulator because the water doesn’t circulate in the machine – it’s just a bath. Maybe the photos will be enough to make you want to whisk egg yolks with sugar and salt, freeze them, vacuum-seal them, and cook them at some temperature between 64-80 degrees Celcius for 4 hours in a water bath (note: they only really need to come to temperature, which takes about 30 minutes, but you can leave them for 4 hours without any ill effect). I hope it does, because you don’t know what you’re missing.
So I’ll tell you what you’re missing – the creamiest, easiest caramel custard sauce of your life, without thickeners, without effort, without the chance of burning. Toss out the double boilers. And that’s just the tip of the iceberg. These chefs are going to learn me a thing or two about eggs, I think.
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