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Chefs As Chemists
Posted by
kdawson
on Tue Nov 06, 2007 08:06 PM
from the you-want-agar-agar-with-that dept.
from the you-want-agar-agar-with-that dept.
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."
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Hydrocolloidal recipes are available (Score:3, Interesting)
You had me at... (Score:2, Funny)
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The important thing about deep frying is that the results should not be fatty. You don't want much, if any fat in your fried foods. That's why you fry a white fish like hake or haddock for your fish and chips. You don't fry a fatty fish like salmon or swordfish, because even if your crust was perfect, the fish itself would be dense where you want it to light and tender. I normally prefer a fat
How is this different than a food chemist? (Score:4, Funny)
Re:How is this different than a food chemist? (Score:5, Funny)
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Re:How is this different than a food chemist? (Score:4, Insightful)
Remember, cooking is an art, baking is a science.
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And in the south, frying is a religion. Thank you! I'll be here all night.
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Old old old (Score:5, Insightful)
You know someone read your post (Score:4, Funny)
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Re:Old old old (Score:5, Funny)
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scam to sell stuff (Score:2)
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I think porn producers cornered the market when it comes to those two...
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Two cents worth... (Score:5, Interesting)
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...
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Take baking, for example. For those who've never tried it, baking is a very precise exercise. You have to add precise amounts of reagents, mix them together in a certain order, and add a precise amount of heat for a precise amount of time. That whole undertaking is very chemical in nature. If you time it wrong, add the wrong amount of heat and/or reagents, then you're
Re:Two cents worth... (Score:4, Funny)
The whole "molecular gastronomy" trend is simply applying the same strategy to "warm" dishes.
...which is why I included it in quotes as well. Slapping lipstick on a pig does NOT make it Natalie Portman.
Paris Hilton, maybe, but not Portman.
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Re:Two cents worth... (Score:5, Informative)
By this logic, it should be called food alchemy. Believe it or not, just because you don't know the difference doesn't mean that there isn't one.
One which essentially nobody - including professional food chemists - understands in even the simplest of organic foods. Cooks sure as hell don't - they know how long to fry it, and generally what's going to happen when you fry it, but one mention of the single most prevalent chemical in the reaction, phospholipthene, and you're greeted with a bunch of glassy looks.
You might as well argue that being a coffee barista is a chemist's process too; it turns out that frothing milk - the process of building a colloid from the 40 or so whey caseins and half dozen fats in cow's milk is more complex than broiling steak, baking bread and aging tofu put together. 'Course, they just get a five minute training on it, like a cook does: use at least four ounces of milk, keep the milk as cold as you can, keep the steam a quarter inch under the surface. That's cooking: being oblivious of the chemistry, and focussing on the food.
Molecular gastronomy is a powerful tool for cooks, but it isn't cooking, and it's essentially useless on its own.
Nonsense. You can vary the amounts of almost every ingredient in a bread dough by 200% or more and it'll still be just fine.
Have you ever baked? At all? Do you know what a bagel actually is? Did you know that if you want a crusty bread, you can just brush the half-cooked loaf with water, then oil, and increase cooking time ~20%? None of those three things you said are true; baking is, with notable rare exceptions like souffle, one of the most forgiving and imprecise forms of cooking there is. You almost couldn't have chosen a less appropriate example, short of slow-roasting meats or curing foods over months.
What, because you need a specific amount of a specific stuff and you have to put it in at the right time? By that logic, putting gas in your car is a work of chemistry, as is washing your clothes (and let's not even get started on mixing paint.) Just because something is made out of chemicals doesn't mean using it is chemistry. Humans are made out of chemicals, too, y'know. In fact, everything is. You might want to look up the word "tautology."
Ah, so ironing my clothes is chemistry, using hot glue guns is chemistry, soldering is chemistry and alka-seltzer is chemistry. Got it.
You're one of those people who argues that anything you can describe a process for is art, aren't you?
The chemical reaction in vinegar volcanoes is a hydrogen exchange salt reaction.
CH_3 COOH + NaHCO_3 --> CH_3 COONa + H_2 CO_3
There are more than two hundred chemical reactions involved in bread, but the one you're probably thinking of is the yeast breaking sugar and alkali into alcohol and carbon dioxide. This is two primary reactions with dozens of variants:
C_6 H_12 O_6 + Therm. --> 2 (C_2 H_5 OH) + 2 CO_2
2 (C_3 H_6 O_3) + K_2 CO_3 --> 2(KC_3 H_5 O_3) + H_2 O + CO_2
The two processes are, in fact, very different. One is a simple chemical reac
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Re:French cooking is like this too (Score:5, Insightful)
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....
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Re:French cooking is like this too (Score:4, Insightful)
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.
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I can't guarantee that the story is true, but that's where it's from.
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Iron Chef? (Score:2)
http://blogs.foodnetwork.com/food/nic/2007/10/episode_2.html [foodnetwork.com]
oh, yes... I did.
Food as Art, Science or chemistry (Score:3, Interesting)
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/ [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 [wikinews.org]. 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!
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What did you think of these "chemists"? (Score:4, Funny)
WD-40 (Score:4, Funny)
Why do they call this food? (Score:3, Insightful)
Sounds worse than McDonald's to me. Yuck.
Molecular gastronomy (Score:3, Interesting)
http://www.chow.com/stories/10411 [chow.com]
I'm trying not to. (Score:4, Funny)
I don't want to think about butter that doesn't melt in the oven, or foie gras in knots
TV Dinners (Score:4, Funny)
For some reason, this is the first thing that popped into my head when I read TFA.
Good Eats with Alton Brown (Score:4, Insightful)
It took a long time for this to appear in /. (Score:5, Interesting)
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.
Re:Foie Gras is some nasty shit... (Score:5, Interesting)
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
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Re:Foie Gras is some nasty shit... (Score:4, Insightful)
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?
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Re:Foie Gras is some nasty shit... (Score:5, Insightful)
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.
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pedophilia was never natural (Score:3, Insightful)
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,
Re:Foie Gras is some nasty shit... (Score:4, Insightful)
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kq77ET5af5U [youtube.com]
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).
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Re:Foie Gras is some nasty shit... (Score:5, Informative)
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 [time.com]
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 [edpsciences.org]
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.
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Re:Foie Gras is some nasty shit... (Score:5, Informative)
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Re:Yet another defender who completely ignores... (Score:4, Insightful)
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
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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
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Life feeds on life. This is necessary.
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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,
Not really (Score:3, Informative)
Vitamin A deficiency [emedicine.com] is still a big problem [who.int] in developing countries, though, and liver is definitely
Re:Foie Gras is some nasty shit... (Score:5, Interesting)
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).
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Re:Food? (Score:4, Insightful)
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