Chefs As Chemists 266
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."
other interesting restaurants (Score:2, Informative)
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/ [chuckeats.com]
Keyah Grande (looks stunning)
http://chuckeats.com/blog3/2007/01/19/keyah-grande-pagosa-springs-co-rip/ [chuckeats.com]
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/ [chuckeats.com]
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.
Re:Two cents worth... (Score:2, Informative)
Re:Foie Gras is some nasty shit... (Score:5, Informative)
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 the best source of it. Of course, too much of a good thing [bbc.co.uk] can also be a problem.
Re:Why is this modded down? (Score:3, Informative)
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.
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
Re:French cooking is like this too (Score:3, Informative)
I can't guarantee that the story is true, but that's where it's from.