5 posts tagged “molecular gastronomy”

Today I wanted to make cheese slices à la Heston Blumenthal that he used in his perfect hamburger recipe. Problem was that I had no sodium citrate laying around. What to do on a sunday morning when all shops are closed? Call your chemist buddy of course. After a few text messages and a quick call I was ready to make my own sodium citrate. Dead simple really:

- 19,2 g citric acid, dissolved in 200ml water at 25C
- 25,2 g sodium bicarbonate (baking soda), dissolved in 200ml water at 25C

Pour the sodium bicarbonate into the citric acid until the reaction stops (it fizzes like crazy)

Then you'll have 400ml sodium citrate solution.  16g solidified sodium citrate = 250 ml

Yesterday I had the pleasure of attending a four hour long workshop at the Culinary Institute of Norway where two of the cooks from the Norwegian national team walked us thought some of their experiments with gels and foams. During this very informative and fascinating evening we became acquainted with the following gel/gum/stabilizing/foaming agents:

Agar Agar (E406)
Sodium alginate (E401)
A cellulose derivative (E 460 - 466)
Gellan gum low acetylated (E 418)
Gellan gum high acetylated (E 418)
Guar gum (E412)
Carrageenan (E 407)
Locust bean gum (E 410)
Xanthan (E 415)

and Calcium lactate (E 327) used to help E401, E418 low and E407 form heat-stable gels.

It was a true pleasure watching two world-class cooks playing and experimenting and they created some truly stunning stuff.

The possibilities with these agents are mind-boggling and I look forward to experiment with these agents.

Upcoming experiments:

- Deconstruct the classic Norwegian meatball dish
- New take on Ferran Adriás deconstructed Potato Tortilla using E415
- Create a champagne gel with suspended gold leaf  

A friend of my mother sent me a mail.. would I cook at her sons 30th birthday party? A few days later I talk to her son. Turns out he's a Blumenthal fan and we get all excited about molecular gastronomy on the phone. So I agree to cook for a medium sized group (about 16-20). Now, what to cook? After lots of preparations this was the finished menu:

• Green tea and vodka foam - the Blumenthal palate cleaner
• White Chocolate and caviar
  
• Haddock Margarita, only inverted with the guacamole on bottom and the chevice on top
  
• Olive oil and rosemary Salmon confit (ala Blumenthal), beetroot risotto
  
• A fat, deconstructed duck  (Duck confit, perfect roasted poatoes)
• Stilton shot, Chevre chantilly (ala Hervé This), cranberry powder, blood orange
  
• Siphon made Frozen Chocolate souffle, Creme Anglaise Ice-Cream, Custard
  
• Maplemallows, campfire style

And now... fish!

The first course in the upcoming national championships must contain 60% haddock. Now, last year the main course had this requirement. After all out hard work and intense training this was what ruined our shot at the 1st place. We forgot the fish and started cooking it much to late and ending up serving the judges fish that was raw in the middle.  So this year we'll stick to serving the bloody fish raw.

Enter chemistry. In parts of South America lime juice is used to 'cook' fish without heat.
The methods and ingredients differ quite a bit from country to country, but the lime juice always plays a big part.

So why does lime juice seemingly cook fish? I'm glad you asked. It doesn't. The acid in lime juice does however 'pickle' the fish, causing it to loose its translucency and making the proteins shed water and thus become more 'tough'.

The end result is delicious and perfect as a snack or a small dish. Now, there are a couple of other things from that part of the world that I quite enjoy: Tequila, habanero chillies and cilantro. So let's throw that in and see how it turns out. To make the appearance more interesting we'll serve this margarita-style in frozen martini glasses with a rind of lime and salt...

The deadline for finishing our menu for the national championship for amateur cooks this year is fast approaching and we are moving fast to meet this deadline.

I've been working 24/7 on the perfect apple cake/pie/? to serve as a part of the dessert and am almost there.
This is a very painful process given that most all apple-based cakes taste great, so how to take the extra step towards perfection?

As always I tend to fall back on molecular gastronomy. I've tried to analyze just what happens, chemistry wise, when an apple cake is baked hoping to learn the flavor formula thus enabling me to remodel this using other techniques allowing me to enhance tastes and textures I want to enhance. So far my conclusions are pretty trivial.

Sous-vide and/or slow baking does not produce any better results then higher temperature cooking does. Even though Pierre Herme thinks one should do 20-hour apples, that is 10 hours of slow cooking and 10 hours of resting, I've found that there is little or no benefit to this technique compared to a much faster process using higher temperatures and extremely thin apple slices.

The same blending of tastes seems to take place in my improved two hour process. I even think exposing apples to higher temperatures gives a slightly better result since the caramelizing of the sugars present is different. Well, we'll see...