Since writing this post, I have been advised about some important food safety issues concerning the temperature at which I cured the salami. Please read Matt’s comment below, or this post.
Forces conspired against me, intent on foiling my latest charcuterie project, but in the end I prevailed. I was determined to take my skills to the next level by making a fermented sausage, in particular Tuscan salami. How hard could it be? I had been successful with my previoussausageattempts, so the only thing that should have been different was the post-stuffing drying and fermenting, which seemed to be a hands-off process.
And that’s where I was wrong. But I wouldn’t learn that until my second attempt.
Both undertakings began the same way, with the usual assembling of ingredients: pork shoulder butt, pork fat, Chianti, nonfat dry milk powder, garlic, toasted fennel seeds, coarse black pepper, pink salt, kosher salt, and dextrose.
I ran the partially frozen fat though the large die of my brand-new KitchenAid Professional 6-quart mixer (shiny metallic black).
I followed the fat with the pork (along with the kosher and pink salt), ground on the small die.
I mixed up a batch of Bactoferm F-RM-32, the live starter culture that would feed on the dextrose and powdered milk and produce lactic acid, which, in turn, would reduce the pH of the salami and inhibit bacterial growth. I added the culture, along with the rest of the ingredients, to my mixing bowl.
After about a minute of mixing at low speed, the meat looked more appetizing, with a uniform distribution of fat.
And here’s where things should have been easy, but went horribly wrong. I soaked hog casings in water, threaded them onto the nozzle of my sausage stuffer, summoned She Who Must Be Obeyed to perform her sausage-guiding duties, and watched in horror as the casings burst open after every two feet of stuffing. We tried tying off the ruptured segments and starting over, only to see the same thing happen, even to the tied-off bits. By the time we gave up, I had to throw away the filling; it had been handled for to long, and I didn’t want to risk contamination. I was so upset and frustrated that I never took any photos of the disaster. Trust me, it wasn’t pretty.
I summoned up the courage to try again about two weeks later, and managed to fill the casings successfully. (After consulting with a few seasoned professionals, I arrived at the conclusion that I had a bad casing, which I hadn’t expected but will have to look out for in the future.)
I was careful to stuff the casings a bit looser than I usually did for sausage, in order to prevent bursting, but also to give myself a good half-inch or more of space between the links, which would make them easier to hang. I wound up with 20 8-inch links.
I let the salami rest overnight (the weather cooperated and kept the Belm Utility Research Kitchen at the ideal 85 °F) to activate the bacteria. They changed color from grayish-brown to a reddish-pink.
All that was left was to weigh them and hang them in my curing cabinet, where they would dry for 12 to 18 days, until they lost at least 30 percent of their total weight.
The cabinet, which lives in my basement, was at the correct humidity – about 70 percent – but was at a significantly higher temperature – 75 °F – them the recommended 60 °F. I figured this would only delay the drying time a bit, but I think the warmer environment promoted mold growth on the outside of the casings. The only acceptable mold on a salmi is dry and white. Anything not white, or anything fuzzy, is bad for the salami. I saw a few mold spots, and wiped them off with a brine-soaked cloth, but eventually I had to sacrifice six links that had become overgrown with the bad stuff.
Before tossing the bad links, I cut one open at a section that appeared to be drying properly.
It looked promising (but not edible), so, in order to preserve what I had left, I wiped each link down again with a cloth soaked in white vinegar.
It occurred to me that the problematic links were all of those that formed the bottom of the three loops I had created when hanging them in the cabinet. My drying setup is a large equipment trunk turned on its end, with holes drilled in the bottom left rear and right top front corners. Both sets of holes are covered with fine mesh screens, and there’s a small USB-powered fan bolted to the outside of the case over the upper set of holes. The fan is set to blow out, which should draw air through the cabinet from bottom to top in what I thought would be an even circulation pattern. The links nearer to the top were drying better and less prone to mold, so I set up a wire rack across the top and placed the lower links on this makeshift shelf.
Eighteen days later – this past Monday – I removed the dried links. They were stiff and unyielding to a firm squeeze, but they were still wet with some of the fat that hadn’t dripped off, an artifact of drying horizontally instead of vertically. More importantly, they looked like salami. If you look carefully, you can see that they had started to develop spots of the beneficial dry white mold. I weighed the links, corrected my math to account for the six I had to toss, and discovered that they had lost 50 percent of their weight.
They looked good. You can see a sliced link at the top; the fat was well distributed, the lean was dense but not dry, and it had a uniform deep red color. And the taste? Meaty, peppery, with tartness from both the wine and the lactic acid. The only thing missing was a glass of the Chianti I used to make it. I vacuum-sealed the links in bags of four, they should keep in the fridge for quite a while. Not that I think they’ll last very long; they’re destined to be a permanent addition to my charcuterie platter.
Thirty two years ago, when I embarked on my “learn to cook” adventure, I bought a set of pots and pans. They were RevereWare, a set of 12 (1-, 2-, and 3-quart saucepans; 8- and 10-inch frying pans; a 5-quart Dutch oven; and a 8-quart stockpot) with copper bottoms. I had a choice of plain stainless or copper, and I chose the latter because I thought they looked better. Little did I know how much trouble those copper bottoms would cause. They were thin enough to make no significant addition to the pots’ heat retention, but required constant cleaning.
I kept those pots shiny for years; I learned the discipline of caring for one’s tools, which I continue to do to this day. I let the bottoms oxidize because most of the pots were backups, replaced by better made, heavier pots from Calphalon and All-Clad. The frying pans died horrible deaths at the hands of former housemates who left them empty on stove burners one time too often.
They’re heavier and thicker-walled than my old pots, easier to clean, and perform better on the stovetop. The saucepans are 2- and 3-quart, the skillets are 8- and 10-inch, and the Dutch oven holds 5 quarts. The only downside was having to bite the bullet and purchase then from Wal-Mart, the exclusive distributor for Tramontina cookware.
Lest you think I’ve given up on copper pots, I recently received a few pieces from a family friend who was remodeling her kitchen. I guess her copper ware was decorative instead of functional, but before she simply tossed the pots in the trash, my mother suggested giving them to me.
As for the RevereWare, it’s been boxed up and put into storage. Someday He Who Will Not Be Ignored will head off to college, and he may very well begin his own cooking lessons with my pots.
The things I do for you, my readers. Even though it was over 100 °F in the Belm Utility Research Kitchen yesterday, I cooked something. It was simple to prepare, but still involved all four stove burners and whole lot of pots and pans. It’s been many years since I last sweated out a meal in this kind of weather, but I think it was worth it.
I unceremoniously dumped everything into the blender and mixed for about 15 seconds.
While the batter sat in the fridge for an hour (during which time the flour hydrated and the air bubbles escaped) I pulled together the rest of the components, inspired in part by a duck roulade I had made for one of She Who Must Be Obeyed’s birthday dinners. I rinsed and de-veined three large chard leaves, sliced shiitake mushrooms and mixed baby potatoes, thawed some duck stock, trimmed a handful of garlic scapes, and shredded the meat from the duck legs. Sadly, the skin disintegrated, denying me a crispy skin garnish.
I simmered the stock to reduce it a bit, and boiled the potato slices for about ten minutes before drying them on paper towels. While the stock and potatoes were busy, I blanched and shocked the chard.
I followed the mushrooms with the scapes and more tasty fat, making sure to get a good char on part of the stems.
I didn’t have to worry about keeping the various components warm – did I mention the kitchen was hot? I added the mushrooms and shredded duck to the reduced stock, let them simmer for a bit, and then corrected the seasoning with a splash of merlot vinegar, which added brightness and acidity.
I poured a generous amount of – you guessed it, duck fat (seasoned, I should mention, with the salt, garlic, and herbs from the confuting process) – into a large pan, tossed in the potatoes, and let them get nice and crispy.
While the potatoes cooked, I made a few crepes, a skill that came back to me rather quickly after years of banging out shells for Mom’s manicotti recipe.
I drained and seasoned the potatoes, then assembled the crepes by layering each one with a chard leaf and a large spoonful of the duck and mushroom filling.
I rolled up the crepes, cut them in half, added a spoonful of the remaining duck stock sauce, plated the potatoes, and garnished with the scapes.
The crepes were light and onion-y, the chard had a slight bitter note, the scapes provided a nice garlic hit – they all worked to balance the earthy duckiness (duckitudinosity?) of the filling. And you can never go wrong with duck fat potatoes. If you have been on the fence about making duck leg confit, this dish should convince you to give it a try. It’s a simple procedure, and eventually you get to “throw together” soothing like this.
I first became aware of durian while watching the Malaysia/Indonesia episode of Michael Palin’s Full Circle travel series. In the city of Yogyakarta, he and his guide purchase the fruit from a street vendor and try it on the spot. Palin’s reaction was polite, but it was clear he was repulsed by the pulpy goodness encased within the thorny flesh (starts at 2:43):
I forgot about it until I saw Anthony Bourdain eating durian ice cream at Polly Ann Ice Cream in San Francisco, in the same episode of A Cook’s Tour in which he eventually would up at The French Laundry. A decade later during the Indonesia episode of No Reservations, he hunts down more durian to consume on his hotel room terrace (starts at 5:45):
Much to my surprise, durian showed up a few times at the local Star Market, but I was to chickens hit to bring one home, let alone eat it. When the H Mart opened nearby, I noticed that they had a freezer case full of durian. It made sense to keep it frozen; it would curb the stench, and give the fruit a longer shelf life. Still, I couldn’t bring myself to try it.
Then I learned that Scott Edelman, who had doubted the existence of the Bacon Explosion, had brought a durian to Balticon and served it to willing victims. I teased him about bringing durian to Readercon – after all, I had provided a bacon explosion, the least he could do was provide durian. When he tried to beg off by saying he was sure he wouldn’t be allowed to transport durian on an airplane, I advised him that the H Mart was right near the hotel and I’d drive him there himself.
And so it came to pass that last Friday morning, accompanied by Josh Jasper, who had grown up in Singapore and claimed durian expertise far beyond that of Scott and me, we drove to H Mart in search of durian. After a  brief panic – the freezer had been moved – we found what we came for and Scott selected three likely candidates. While we dithered about the durian, we noticed that huge durian-like fruits were being unloaded behind us, which is when I realized that fresh jackfruit was also available. We bought one of those as well and returned to the hotel, where Scott was entrusted with the safekeeping of our bounty. The plan was to serve the durian midway through the Friday night reception, figuring that we’d get a larger crowd due to alcohol-fueled bravado.
Later that day, at 10:30 in the evening on the sidewalk near the hotel’s main entrance, this happened:
She Who Must Be Obeyed filmed the proceedings with her phone camera, Scott cut open and served the fruit, and various hangers-on provided most of the geeky commentary. You’ll notice that Scott’s knife broke while cutting open the first specimen, but one of the onlookers provided a dagger (of course) to finish the work. I tried to convince Scott to cut the durian along the equator -as Bourdan did -Â instead of pole to pole, which would have made it easier to serve.
We had plastic spoons and paper cups to serve small portions to everyone. The “Oh, that’s brilliant” comment is from Readercon 22 Guest of Honor Geoff Ryman. Josh is making the “barbarians can’t appreciate good food remark,” and She Who is clearly upset about having to be near me after I sample the first helping.
Once my critical faculties returned after taking a heady whiff of the custardy glop, I supplemented my first reaction – “That’s kind of awesome” – with a better description: “It tastes like onion soubise custard.” It helped that it was still cold when I ate it, but I was careful to let the pulp warm up in my mouth before swallowing to get the full effect. It was simultaneously sweet and oniony with a very smooth texture, not stringy at all.
I was informed that we had purchased the highly sought after monthong variety of durian, prized for its creamy sweet pulp and mild aroma.
Scott cut open the jackfruit and served it as a chaser to the durian. It was sweet and fibrous like pineapple, but tasted more like cantaloupe. Much to my surprise, I discovered that I am mildly allergic to jackfruit. It caused the same reaction – itchy throat – that I get when I eat raw cherries or whole apples. If the durian and produced the same reaction I would have had a legitimate excuse for never eating it again.
I should mention that I had a backup plan if Scott had chickened out or the durian was unavailable: durian candy that I found at my local Asian grocery.
I opened the bag to split the contents with Scott, and was greeted with a whiff that was stronger than the real fruit we had consumed the night before. The taffy-like candy’s first ingredient was durian juice, the last was “durian flavor.” Think about that – there are places in the world where people willingly consume durian juice, and where there is a need for durian flavor.
Now I can cross another culinary dare off of my list (which included haggis). I hear that the Sardinians eat maggot-infested cheese;Â maybe I can convince Scott to acquire some for next year.
This is a transcript of a talk I presented at Readercon 22 on Friday, July 15. Images are included as they appeared in the slide show. I had submitted the following description for the conference program guide:
Cooking has always been based on science, but the connection was made explicit with the 1984 publication of Harold McGee’s revolutionary On Food and Cooking. Chefs like Ferran Adria and Heston Blumenthal consider their research laboratories to be just as important as their kitchens in the development of new dining experiences, and have embraced the use of hydrocolloids, liquid nitrogen, and other agents to create foods that can only be described as science-fictional. With the recent publication of Modernist Cuisine and the ready availability of immersion circulators, gels, and “meat glue,” an ambitious home cook can experiment with methods that would have been out of reach even five years ago. How far can science take us in the kitchen? We’ve clearly moved beyond “astronaut food,” but are some of the more outlandish predictions SF has made about food within reach? We’ll look at examples–both old and new–of the extremes to which cooking can be pushed.
*****
In 1979, while still a student at MIT working toward a biology degree, I took a summer job working at the General Foods Technical Research Center in Tarrytown, New York. Although it owned the Birdseye vegetables brand – easily the healthiest food it sold – most of GF’s products were either convenience foods or coffee.
The research groups were organized like a nutrition label: fats & oils, carbohydrates, flavors, and proteins, which is where I was assigned to work. The three big proteins products were Jell-O, Cool Whip, and Shake ‘n’ Bake. Jell-O brand gelatin dessert (sorry, that’s now a conditioned reflex with me) is more than a century old. This photo is an ad from 1908.
I was involved with many projects in the Proteins group:
We had to alter the formulation for Cool Whip to accommodate a new source of sodium caseinate, the milk protein that was the topping’s main component.
I worked on improving the viscosity of gelatin when it was subjected to prolonged high heat, using formaldehyde as the strengthening agent. Formaldehyde was an approved food additive, present in denture adhesives, and apparently still not classified as a carcinogen due to heavy lobbying from chemical companies.
I tested “bacon analogue,†a soy-based bacon substitute that cooked like bacon. The red and white “phases,” which corresponded to the fat and lean layers, had different rates of contraction, which would cause the edges to curl when heated. Just like real bacon! It looked like bacon, cooked lie bacon, and tasted like hot cardboard. Artificial bacon bits are still made from soy.
The most interesting project was the “shrimp analogue†being developed by a visiting Japanese research fellow. Egg albumin (whites) was mixed with shrimp flavoring and freeze-dried. The resulting powder was extruded through a cheese puff machine, soaked in water, and then pressed into shrimp-shaped molds. It was an exact recreation of the texture, but the taste still needed work.
*****
Two things happened to me when I returned to MIT after my summer at GF: The first was I discovered the world of speculative fiction that existed outside of my limited library of Niven, Clarke, Asimov, Herbert, and Tolkein. I don’t need to mention how influential Harlan Ellison’s Dangerous Visions was; it’s one of the reasons why there’s a Readercon. Harlan Ellison was the Guest of Honor (GoH) at Readercon 11.
I read through “The Best SF Stories,†an Nebula Awards anthology compiled by SFWA, a one-stop somewhat representative history of the field. Roger Zelazny’s Chronicles of Amber, at least the Corwin cycle, struck me as the first fantasy books in which characters actually ate regular food instead of nuts & berries, game, or magical bread. Corwin wouldn’t start a hellride without eating a well-described breakfast.
In 1980 Bantam published Fundamental Disch, a collection of Thomas Disch’s short stories (with a forward by Readercon 2 GoH Chip Delany). The first story in the collection is “Descending,†published in 1964. It was the first time I had seen a character defined both by the contents – or lack thereof – of his kitchen…
Catsup, mustard, pickle relish, mayonnaise, two kinds of salad dressing, bacon grease, and a lemon. Oh yes, two trays of ice cubes. In the cupboard it wasn’t much better: jars and boxes of spice, flour, sugar, salt—and a box of raisins!
An empty box of raisins.
… and also by his shopping list.
… A jar of instant and a 2-pound can of drip-ground coffee, a large tin of corned beef, packaged soups and boxes of pancake mix and condensed milk. Jam, peanut butter, and honey. Six cans of tuna fish. Then he indulged himself in perishables: English cookies, and Edam cheese, a small frozen pheasant—even fruitcake. He never ate so well as when he was broke. He couldn’t afford to.
In his 1989 novel Look Into the Sun, James Patrick Kelly (Readercon 19 GoH – yes, I am contractually obligated to point them out), describes a food substance called Vitabulk: cheap to produce, nutritionally complete, and with an almost indefinite shelf life. People carried kits with them (which I always imagined as similar to the “flavor packets†that come with instant ramen) so they could vary the flavor of the stuff, which tasted “like insulation.†At a dinner party for his wealthy friends, the protagonist serves wieners and potato salad, a meal that was greeted with this reaction:
The guests were in various stages of gustatory ecstasy. The fare was not at all unusual for the wealthy; they ate at least one natural meal a day and meat or fish once a week. For others, forty-five grams of USDA guaranteed pure beef frankfurter was an extravagance: Christmas dinner, birthday treat.
This idea of mass-produced “people chow†appeared again in Norman Spinrad’s Little Heroes, in which anyone could get a free serving of “kibble†dispensed from a vending machine. It was nutritionally complete, had a long shelf life, and required no preparation.
A friend who’s an entertainer was constantly forgetting to eat. He’d get cranky and only then would he think to eat something. When he asked us how to solve the problem, we all suggested that he keep stashes of food bars (Power Bars, Cliff Bars, etc.) around so he always had access to food. Being somewhat of an extremist, he decided that a few bags of monkey chow would work just as well. I spent a few days talking him out of it, citing the damage to his teeth and the havoc all of the fiber would wreak on his gut as the two primary reasons why a primate diet was contraindicated.
As it turns out, a few years ago someone decided to try living off nothing but monkey chow and water for a week, a feat he chronicled in a blog called The Monkey Chow Diaries. I can only guess that ZuPreem brand is better than Purina.
If you read enough SF stories set in the future, you reach the inescapable conclusion that people just don’t care about food, as long as they have something to eat. Preparing food was drudgery, something to be avoided or made as painless as possible. These notions, popularized in the post-war ’50s, gave rise to the convenience food industry I found myself working for.
As recently as last week – in Rule 34 by Charles Stross (Readercon 21 GoH) I read a prediction about “cultured meat extruders,†machines which sat in the kitchen and made “chicken†or other “meats†from tissue cultures, much in the same way we have bread machines. (Although they don’t so much manufacture the bread from raw feedstock as process ingredients.)
In The Wonderful Future That Never Was, a collection of predictions collected from the Popular Mechanics archives, the future of food was laid out over the course of a few decades:
Dairy derived from kerosene (1928)
All frozen food (1937)
Made from cereal grass (1940)
“In A.D. 2000, cooking as an art is only a memory in the minds of old people.†(1950)
Served in concentrated or pill form (1928)
We’ve been spared kerosene-derived dairy, but we can walk through supermarkets where we could buy entire weeks’ worth of meals from the freezer cases. Not much of our food supply contains grass, but soy and corn have become ubiquitous ingredients of almost any processed food. The prediction for 2000 isn’t quite as dire as presented here, but it’s not that far off the mark, either. And we’ll get back to the food pills.
For all of its advances and improvements, “food science†was still considered a tool of agribusiness and convenience food conglomerates.
*****
The second thing that happened when I returned to MIT after that summer at GF was I decided I would teach myself how to cook. I bought utensils and a few cookbooks (The Joy of Cooking, The French Chef Cookbook), and set a few rules:
Something new every week
You kill it, you still eat it
No cop-out meals
The “something new†rule would eventually result in my developing some good kitchen skills as I added techniques to my repertoire. Julia Child was an excellent teacher in absentia. It helped that I had some lab experience; friends have said that I don’t so much carve a chicken as dissect it.
For serious cooks, everything changed in 1984, when Harold McGee published On Food and Cooking: The Science and Lore of the Kitchen, still the most thorough examination of the science behind what happens in the kitchen. Not only did he explain why recipes worked or failed, but he also debunked a lot of common kitchen myths. Read McGee and you learn will how recipes work, as well as how to fix them when they fail.
While a culinary revolution was starting in Europe, I left academic medical research and moved to the private biotech sector. I did a lot of work with tissue culture – growing specific cells as test substrates for drugs under development. I was also responsible for tending small-scale fermentation reactors – growth chambers where specially engineered cell lines expressed proteins that we purified to use as drugs. I had to develop scrupulous sterile handling techniques so as not to contaminate the cell lines.
I worked with a lot of specialized equipment for regulating temperatures and growth rates: water baths accurate to a tenth of a degree, balances accurate to a hundredth of a gram – all second nature to the work at hand.
Shortly after This and Kurti started their work, Ferran Adriá, a young chef at el Bulli – a tiny restaurant on the Costa Brava in Spain – started creating amazing food based on new techniques. Instead of sauces, he used foams, concentrated flavor essences into which air had been whipped. He also encapsulated liquids into edible spheres that would burst open in your mouth.
You can see a combination of the techniques in this dish, pea jelly, banana, and lime ice cream. There’s ice cream, various gels, unusual textures.
This is a chocolate air, with crisp raspberry (frozen solid in liquid nitrogen and then shattered) and eucalyptus water ice.
This is instant chocolate cake, created by Ferran’s dessert chef, his brother Albert. Cake batter is added to a whipped cream dispenser, charged with nitrous oxide, foamed into a paper cup, and cooked in a microwave for thirty seconds. To be more specific, this is myinstant chocolate cake, made with the same technique.
I’m passing around a sample of regular spherification, in which a liquid is mixed with the alginate and calcium lactate, then dropped into a calcium chloride bath. The drops solidify and retain their spherical shape. You’re eating apple juice “caviar,†but this technique can be used with any flavored liquid, either sweet or savory. Spherification was actually invented in 1945 as a way to produce artificial chocolate-covered cherries.
Adriá made it very clear why he cooked the way he did:
Provide unexpected contrasts of flavor, temperature, and texture. Nothing is what it seems. The idea is to provoke, surprise, and delight the diner.
To further that end, he closed his restaurant for half of every year in order to develop the next year’s menu, which would repeat no dish from any previous year. elBulli became the best restaurant in the world, a title it will hold until it closes for good at the end of this summer.
One of Adria’s contemporaries is Heston Blumenthal, chef at The Fat Duck, in Bray (outside of London), England. Blumenthal is self-trained, but he’s a research fanatic with connections to people in the food science industry. He also has a lab kitchen across the street from his restaurant that runs year round.
The dish in this photo is a red cabbage gazpacho with pommerey grain mustard ice cream, a play on classic peasant borscht. This was an early appearance of a savory ice cream, which has become much more common now.
When this dish is presented, diners are told they have orange and beet jellies, and they should start with the orange. The orange-colored jelly is flavored with golden beets; the purple-colored jelly is flavored with blood oranges. Blumenthal plays with how your visual perception effects your taste.
This isn’t a photo from the Fat Duck, it’s from my dining room table. I served this dish as a pre-dessert course at She Who Must Be Obeyed’s birthday dinner in May. Our guests were quite baffled by the disconnect between eye and tongue.
This is hot and iced tea. Drink from one side of the glass and the tea is hot, drink from the other side and the tea is cold. The drink is served in a double-walled glass to prevent your hand from picking up any temperature cues, the contents are fluid gels at two different temperatures, made with tea and gellan. A divider is placed in the glass, the gels are poured in simultaneously, and then the divider is removed. The slightly different densities of the gels keep them separated for a minute or so.
In his television special “Heston’s Victorian Feast,†Blumenthal elaborated on this technique to create the fictional “Drink Me†potion consumed by Alice, which tasted  – in order – like toffee, hot buttered toast, custard, cherry tart, and turkey. He created infusions of each flavor, then incorporated progressively lager amounts of gellan to create a five-layered drink that delivered the flavors in order, making Carroll’s fantasy a reality.
*****
In a classic case of parallel evolution, the Clearly Canadian beverage company launched a drink called Orbitz in 1997. This is an unopened bottle that was handed to me as a free sample fourteen years ago, it has sat on a shelf in my kitchen undisturbed for all of that time. Notice how the little spheres (banana flavored) remain in suspension; they’re made from xanthan gum and are suspended in the same gellan solution that Blumentahl uses. The gellan’s density is adjusted with sugar, which makes the solution clear and produces a neutral buoyancy state with the spheres.
Despite the lava light packaging, the drink never achieved escape velocity. Nobody wanted to drink something that was pineapple-banana-cherry-coconut flavored, at least not when it wasn’t being served at The Fat Duck.
Even the toy industry got in on the act. Doctor Dreadful’s Food Lab was a kit that let you make creepy candies out of various gel-based powders. The bugs you can see molded here were gelatin,
… but you could also make “blobs,†“eyes,†and “worms†with flavored spherification components. This toy will be back on the market this fall, probably because of the rising popularity of…
…Popin’ Cookin’, a Japanese food toy. Using the same principles as Dr. Dreadful, but without the monster-themed equipment, you can produce realistic looking “sushi.†The “uni†(roe) are spheres made from the standard method, the rest of the bits are all gelatins with varying textures.
All of the things I’ve shown so far are manipulations of hydrocolloids, which are nothing more than solids dispersed in liquids. All of these solids you’ve seen listed as ingredients in various foods are nothing more than texture and thickening agents with different properties.
Much to my surprise, it all came back to Jell-O. I’m also pretty sure we could use agar instead of formaldehyde to improve the viscosity of heated gels.
*****
Another chef who utilizes modern techniques is Wylie Dufrense at his WD-50 restaurant in New York. This is a deconstructed eggs benedict, with dehydrated Canadian bacon, almost solidified egg yolk cooked in a water bath, and hollandaise sauce that has been thickened with gellan, frozen into cubes, coated with English muffin crumbs, then deep fried. They become crispy on the outside and gooey on the inside.
Dufrense also pioneered the use of transglutaminase, an enzyme that bonds proteins together. He started calling it “meat glue†because of how it behaved. I was talking to Raj Patel, an author who writes about the world food supply, and he told me “I remember when ‘meat glue’ was another term for ‘rice’.â€
Activa is the brand name given to the enzyme by its manufacturer, Ajinomoto. The same company is the world’s largest supplier of MSG, and their scientists are credited with discovering “umami,†the fifth taste.
These are photos from my preparation, I knew my chicken dissection skills would come in handy some day.
This is bacon-wrapped skirt steak, a recipe developed by Alex Tabot and Aki Kamozawa at Ideas in Food. It’s made by gluing two thin skirt steaks together to make a thicker steak, then bonding a solid layer of bacon strips to the outside. The whole thing is rolled in plastic wrap, then cooked in a constant-temperature water bath for about an hour. It gets a quick turn in a hot pan to crisp up the bacon before serving.
Also notice the barely-poached egg on the asparagus.
Don’t confuse that dish with a bacon explosion, which is a bacon pot holder wrapped around a core of bacon-filled sausage. This bad boy has to sit in a barbecue smoker for four or five hours before it’s ready. This photo is of the explosion I brought to last year’s Readercon, to prove to Scott Edelman that the dish wasn’t a myth.
I would be remiss if I didn’t mention one last chef, Grant Achatz of Alinea restaurant in Chicago. He was a sous chef at The French Laundry – the best restaurant in America – when he took a two-week working vacation at elBulli under Ferran Adriá. He would eventually open Alinea, and is now considered the leading modernist chef in the US.
This dish is one of his classics, hot potato cold potato. The bowl contains vichyssoise – cold potato soup. Suspended on the pin is a fried potato topped with a slice of truffle, a chive sprig, and cubes of butter and parmesan cheese. Pull out the pin, let the garnishes fall into the cold soup, and slurp it down.
The sample being passed around is the dry caramel alone. It’s made with the standard ingredients: sugar, butter and cream (with glucose syrup to create a smother texture), but before it completely cools, it’s mixed with tapioca maltodextrin, a drying agent. It redistributes the moisture evenly across the mixture, creating this dry powder that reconstitutes in your mouth.
*****
A few years ago Nathan Myrvhold, former director of Microsoft Research, asked on the eGullet forums (a known foodie hangout) if anyone could direct him to a source of cooking times and temperatures for sous vide cooking. Receiving no answer, he began researching the subject himself.
Sous vide cooking involves two techniques: The first is vacuum sealing food in plastic bags with various seasonings, aromatics, or other liquids. The second is cooking those sealed bags in a constant-temperature water bath for a set time until the food is done. The term “sous vide†is French for “under vacuum,†which describes how the bags are sealed.
Much to my surprise, the constant temperatures needed for this kind of cooking are best produced by the same immersion circulators I used to work with tin the lab, and are made by the same company: Polysciences.
Don’t confuse this technique with the boil-in-bags from the freezer section. Those contain fully-cooked food that you defrost in boiling water, sous vide is cooking raw ingredients to get them to the desired temperature.
You can find the Polysciences circulator in most restaurants, but the rest of us who can’t afford the $1,000 price have come up with a number of what chef David Chang calls “ghetto†solutions. The simplest is just a pot on a stove with a well-regulated burner. It can be done, but it requires constant attention. The second is modifying a large rice cooker. Add a thermocouple (temperature probe) to the interior, have it send data to a power controller, and it will cycle the cooker’s heating element to maintain constant temperature. You can also add a circulating pump to prevent hot spots from forming. The third solution is to build your own immersion circulator from commonly available parts. This is my circulator, built from teacup heaters, an aquarium pump, a thermocouple, and a temperature controller. That’s a leg of lamb that’s been cooking for 24 hours at 57 °C (135 °F). When it came out of the bag I crisped the outside over a hot charcoal fire. I wound up with perfect medium rare lamb all the way through the meat, with a crispy crust.
It’s a good thing I didn’t know about sous vide while I was still working in the lab; I would have been fired for contaminating the equipment with my after-hours cooking experiments.
In April of this year, Myrvhold finally published the results of his simple question to the forum: a six-volume book (actually five books and a waterproof kitchen manual with the recipes) called Modernist Cuisine (MC), which is the term that is slowly replacing “molecular gastronomy†as a description of the food we’ve seen so far.
One of Myrvhold’s collaborators is Chris Young, who worked at The Fat Duck’s food lab. Being a Microsoft millionaire (and looking to rehabilitate his patent-troll bad guy persona), Myrvhold spared no expense in equipping the best food research lab money could buy. There’s a lot of science in the book, but one volume is nothing but recipes. This is the hamburger recipe, which takes at least two solid days to make. The buns are baked from scratch, the sauce is a custom-blended mayonnaise, the lettuce is smoke-infused, the tomato is compressed under vacuum, the cheese is reformulated to melt perfectly, the burger is ground so that all of the fibers are aligned in one direction, and the ketchup is made with mushrooms.
Blumenthal came up with a similar recipe for his “In Search of Perfection†TV series. I will never make either hamburger. I have my limits.
In order to show you what happens during different cooking processes, the researchers at MC cut appliances in half and photographed them while being used to cook. Here’s a charcoal grill coking hamburgers. The photo shows the most important flavor component of a grilled burger: the pyrolized fat from the flame-ups.
Here’s pad thai being cooked in a wok. The rig would catch fire every few seconds as hot oil spilled out onto the open flame.
I have cooked one MC recipe so far, the Thai beef short rib with sweet and sour glaze. It took three days to make and involved cooking the beef sous vide, browning it with a blowtorch, and creating fried beef jerky and dehydrated garlic chip garnishes. This was the main course for She Who Must Be Obeyed’s birthday dinner.
This is another of the recipes, Astronaut Ramen. It looks like a styrofoam cup with a lid, but when you pour boiling water into it, the lid and cup – which are made from freeze-dried gelatin – dissolve and become the base for the soup and freeze dried ingredients inside. I really want to make this someday, but I don’t have access to a freeze drier. If you know of a lab I can use after hours, talk to me later.
That ramen is a far cry from what we thought astronaut food would look like. Here are Dave Bowman and Frank Poole enjoying “dinner†on board the Discovery. Everything was a solid paste except the coffee. It still beats food pills.
*****
And so, finally, let’s talk about food pills.
As a freshman, I was given a physics problem to solve, which was really an exercise in estimation and calculation:  How many candy bars did my professor need to eat in order to escape the Earth’s orbit with a single jump?
We know the escape energy for a 1 kilogram mass, and we know the mass of the professor (300 pounds is roughly 136 kilos). We assumed 100% conversion of energy from one form to another, ignoring the inevitable heat radiated off during the process.
Escape energy for 1 kg = 3.1 x 107 J
136 kg = 4.22 x 109 J
When we had to solve this problem, we also had to convert kilocalories (the energy unit of a bog-standard Hershey bar) to Joules, but I’ve reworked the calculation with a Mars bar (which, in deep-fried form, is part of my Scottish heritage’s national cuisine) which helpfully lists its energy content in Joules.
Mars bar = 9.67 x 105 J
How many bars do you think it would take?
4.22 x 109 J / 9.67 x 105 J = 4,360 Mars bars
It’s almost four and a half thousand, which would take quite a while to consume.
Food pills violate the laws of physics. The kinds of nutrients we consume aren’t very energy dense. These calculations also ignore our need for vitamins, minerals, and other trace nutrients.
Eat a bacon cheeseburger instead, it’s one giant pill on a bun.
Which leads to an important point: people like to eat – and some people like to cook – real food. For cooks it’s an act of creation, and sometimes art; for eaters, it’s all about the enjoyment. Jim Kelly had it right: people get excited about real food.
“The future has already arrived. It’s just not evenly distributed yet.â€
— William Gibson
William Gibson (Readercon 8 GoH) also had it right: The future of food is no different than the future of any other technology. As we have seen, it has already arrived – via Adria, Blumenthal, Achatz, and others – but it’s still waiting for its even distribution.
If you are a regular reader of this blog, it may surprise you to learn that I was a very picky eater as a kid. Bag lunches rotated through peanut butter sandwiches, jelly sandwiches (but never PB & J), an occasional ham sandwich, and bologna sandwiches, the mainstay of the lunch menu.
Mom never figured out that I hated the stuff, even if it was decent beef bologna from the German deli around the corner from our house. It was rubbery, tasted like hot dogs, and had a plasticky “skin” around the outside edge. (I’d learn much later that it was the collagen casing used to form the bologna.) Even though I was from an Italian family, I never took a liking to the meat product named after the great city in Emilia-Romagna.
When I saw that the July Charcutepalooza challenge was making emulsified sausage, I knew I’d have to face down my bologna problem. I had already made hot dogs, but they were disqualified for being submitted a month early. It was time to make a mortadella.
There were a lot of ingredients to assemble this time: pork shoulder, pork fat, blanched diced pork fat, blanched peeled pistachios (prepared by She Who Must Be Obeyed), white pepper, mace, coriander, bay leaf, nutmeg, pink salt, kosher salt, garlic, and white wine.
I ground the meat with the wine, garlic and both salts, and then the fat, keeping each separate and cold – meat in the fridge, fat in the freezer.
I combined the meat, fat, and spices in my food processor.
Five minutes of blending resulted in a pink mixture that looked like soft strawberry ice cream.
After adding nonfat powdered milk to the emulsion and blending for a few more minutes, I folded in the pistachios and diced fat.
While I was processing the meat, the casing had been soaking in water for the previous 24 hours. Unlike the hog casings I use for sausage, which resemble a bucket of guts, the mortadella casing arrived in this ominous industrial container:
When I unpacked it for its soak, I noticed that this particular bit of the cow was sealed at one end. Although I make no claims at being an expert on bovine anatomy, the biologist in me was puzzled: What part of the animal’s intestinal tract has a ten-foot dead end, and what function could it serve? A quick Wikipedia check explained that a beef bung is a cow cecum, a pouch near the connection of the large and small intestines. In humans it’s not very long, and ends in the appendix. In cows, it’s full of bacteria which assist in the enzymatic breakdown of cellulose.
With my anatomical curiosity satisfied, it was time to stuff the bung (not a euphemism for anything else). Given the casing’s large diameter – between four and five inches – I didn’t need a stuffer, I could fill it by hand. Which is what I did, taking care not to overstretch.
When I had added all of the filling, I removed as much air from the casing as I could.
Instead of poaching the tied-off sausage in a pot on the stove, I vacuum sealed it and cooked it sous vide at 76 °C for about two hours, rotating the bag every half hour.
After a chill in an ice bath, the mortadella was ready. It was firm and very easy to slice.
I slit a few inches of the casing, peeled it back, and cut some thin slices on the deli slicer.
I was concerned that the fat and pistachios seemed to be distributed unevenly, but a slice made closer to the middle showed that it wasn’t a problem. Still, I can see that there’s a skill to mortadella stuffing that creates a final product with evenly distributed garnishes throughout.
How did it taste? It was very well spiced, similar to, but distinct from, the hot dogs I had made. The perfectly smooth texture was offset by the pistachio crunch and the chunks of fat that melted in the mouth. Also, bonus, no nasty skin to peel off!
This will be a regular addition to my charcuterie plate, which will never be full of baloney.
In early March, Anthony Bourdain tweeted a couple of blurry photos of the “wall of the super-secret Chang Project HQ at ZPZ.” ZPZ is Zero Point Zero, the production company that produces No Reservations, which led me to conclude that they would be making a television show with chef David Chang from Momofuku. I’d watch that show, I thought, and waited to see what would develop.
It was almost a TV show, then an iPad app, but now, in collaboration with McSweeney’s, Lucky Peach the quarterly magazine (the title is the english translation of the Japanese word momofuku) hit the stands last week. If you know anything about David Chang, it should come as no surprise that issue number one is devoted almost exclusively to ramen (with a bit of egg thrown in).
What do you get in the 175 pages? Peter Meehan recounts his trip to Tokyo with Chang and the insane amount of ramen they consumed in three days. Bourdain discusses the three films that he believes explains Chang’s obsession (Tampopo, House, and The Ramen Girl). There’s a feature about Ivan Orkin, a New York Jew who runs Ivan Ramen, one of the best ramenyas in Tokyo. There’s “a specifist’s guide to the regional ramen of Japan.” Bourdain, Chang, and Wylie Dufrense talk about mediocrity in the restaurant business. Ruth Reichl taste tests instant ramen (big surprise: throw away the flavor packets, cook the noodles). Â There is a wonderful series of woodcuts of the “Tokyo Ramen Gods”:
But the meat of the magazine is the recipes. Chang comes up with ramen-based versions of some European classics: cacio e pepe, fideos, and gnocchi Parisienne (now on my “must try” list). Harold McGee writes about alkalinity and alkaline noodles, then tackles the myth of “Chinese restaurant syndrome.” And then, finally, Chang offers up his reworked recipes for ramen noodles and ramen broth, both of which he had hinted at during his Harvard lecture.
The egg section leads off with a chart describing the structure and texture of whole eggs cooked sous vide at different temperatures. Do you like your poached eggs a bit more solid? Cook them at 64 °C instead of the standard 60 °C. Although it isn’t exactly a recipe, it wouldn’t be difficult to reverse-engineer Dufrene’s Eggs Benedict, WD-50 Style from the pictorial layout.
A day after I had consumed the Lucky Peach first issue in one sitting, my monthly subscription to Food and Wine (a “free gift” from American Express) arrived in the mail. F&W is unreadable; it screams about a lifestyle I’ll never have or want. Lucky Peach, on the other hand, is single-minded in its pursuit of what’s wonderful about cooking and eating food. If this first issue is any indication, it will become my favorite food magazine.
Hastily written while simultaneously attempting to purchase tickets at Next Restaurant.
About a month after writing about hydrocolloid food toys I received this email from Robert Knetzger:
Liked your posting on kid’s food toys. Yeah, Incredible Edibles were yucky, but the big reason Mattel stopped making them was the fact that the even tho they were “sugar free,” the starch, needed in their formulation so that they firmed up from a liquid, was metabolized very quickly into sugar—not a good thing for diabetic kids. Mattel made a deal not to recall, but instead got to relabel all the toys on the shelves with food warning stickers. (Read about it here: http://makezine.com/20/makertoys/)
Yes, DrD food toys were cool—I know a little bit about it as I’m the inventor of the toy. Do you happen to know when Faran started his molecular gastronomy—could DrD have actually been the first with the alginate blobs and worms? Doctor Dreadful was marketed in Europe as ‘Professor Horribilus.’ Could it be…?…nah…
After TYCO was sold to Mattel, my partner and I re-licensed DrD to a small toy company, Funrise, who sold new versions of the toys for a few years. Â Some of the formulations had improved flavors: mango and sour apple worms! bubble gum brains! I could send you some old samples to try.
And, yes, DrD is coming back this year! Â Look for all new versions of the toys from Spinmaster toys in the fall.
My first reaction was “Doctor Dreadful reads my blog!” My second was “I need some of those samples.”
After assuring him that the spherification technique had been developed in 1942 as a method for producing artificial cherries (thank you, Modernist Cuisine timeline), I asked for some samples, which he promptly sent:
I realized that I no longer had my old Food Lab or the instructions, so I wold be unable to make any of the edibles. When I mentioned this to Bob, he replied:
Sorry it took me awhile to find this info. Â All of the activities/experiments were calibrated to the plastic beakers and test tubes so I had to find the original food formulator notes that go wtih these pouched samples.
Equipped with the powders and the correct mixing formulas, I set out to recreate “clotting crud” and “foaming brains.” First up, the crud: I dissolved watermelon-flavored solution (calcium chloride) in a small bowl, and sour apple crud (sodium alginate and calcium lactate) in another.
You can see the results up top: single drops formed little spheres, dragging the dropper through the mixture while squeezing formed “worms,” and holding the tip in one spot while slowly extruding the solution made “eyes.”
I moved on to the brains, dissolving “foaming A watermelon” mix in a large bowl, and “foaming B” in a smaller one.
I slowly poured B into A, stirring the whole time, until I wound up with a bowl of thick, stable foam.
All that remained was for me to taste the fruits of my labors. If I had somehow been in denial about being an adult, a taste of the crud and brains quickly convinced me that I wasn’t a kid anymore. The stuff was incredibly sweet, but tasted just like watermelon or sour apple.
I also realized that making the stuff wasn’t particularly exciting — it had more of an air of a lab bench experiment than playing with a toy. That’s the genius of the Food Lab’s wacky containers: everything tastes better when you’ve extruded it through a series of pumps and tubes, or consumed it out of a plastic skull.
I’l be waiting for the Return of Doctor Dreadful this fall. Or, since it will be the third incarnation of the toy, the Return of the Son of Doctor Dreadful.
Because we live near Somerville’s prime viewing spot for the Boston Esplanade fireworks, I never do any holiday grilling on July 4th. On the few occasions I’ve tried, I’ve had to fend off drunken passers-by – not a pleasant assertion of independence, either theirs or mine. Yesterday was no different:Â She Who Must Be Obeyed and I treated ourselves to our annual lobster roll, and I grilled dinner on Sunday the 3rd.
I alluded to the grilling project at the end of a previous post, and after consulting with a friend who had cooked a similar meal, I worked out a plan that involved minimal effort  and maximum flavor. I would marinate and then sous vide cook a boneless leg of lamb, then finish it on the grill and add a pomegranate glaze. I staretd two days earlier with the lamb, a pint of Greek yogurt, and an ounce of harissa.
I mixed the harissa and yogurt, covered the lamb with the marinade, and then vacuum sealed it for a day-long rest in the fridge. Using Greek yogurt meant the marinade was thick enough not to get sucked out of the bag during the sealing process.
After a ful 24 hours of marinating, I unsealed the bag, wiped off as much of the yogurt mixture as I could, then vacuum sealed the lamb in a new bag with an entire stick of butter divided over the top and bottom.
About an hour before dinner time I reduced a pint of pomegranate juice to a quarter cup of glaze, then I removed the bag from its warm bath.
When drained and patted dry, the lamb didn’t look all that appetizing, but I knew it was a uniform medium rare inside.
While my grill warned up, I prepared the two sides: minted couscous and glazed carrots with cumin.
I crisped the outside of the lamb on the grill over a very hot hardwood charcoal fire. The lamb needed no more than a few minutes on each side to develop a dark char. After a short rest, I sliced and plated the lamb, then drizzled the glaze over the top.
You can see that the lamb is perfectly pink all the way to the edges, the result of the long sous vide cooking step. It was tender and juicy, complemented by the pomegranate and a hint of smoke from the grill. Best of all, while it took some time and a bit of planning, it was dead simple to actually prepare.
I got to be lazy and cook a tasty meal on a holiday weekend. I love it when a plan comes together.
He Who Will Not Be Ignored has the misfortune of having inherited his parents’ dentition, which means that he will spend his adolescence with a mouth full of gums and wires. Orthodontic appliances aren’t nearly as dire and uncomfortable as the Torquemada-esque torture rigs of my childhood, but there are still some rules about what can and cannot be eaten. Unfortunately for He Who, eating food off the bone is verboten (biting down on a bone could shear a wire holder off of a tooth), which rules out ribs and wings – the cornerstone of his protein food group.
Having recently endured both tooth extractions and new wiring, I wanted to make a few dinners that were tasty but would still give him some chewing relief. I had two recipes in mind, both versions of Japanese street food.
Tori no Kara-age
Tori no kara-age, Japanese fried chicken nuggets, is a dish I’ve made before using this recipe. Not only is it boneless and quick to prepare, but it also requires only five ingredients: four skinless boneless chicken thighs cut into chunks, a half cup of corn starch, a small chunk of ginger run over a microplane grater, three tablespoons of soy sauce, and a tablespoon of bourbon (I keep a bottle of Maker’s Mark around for medicinal purposes).
I mixed the soy, bourbon, and ginger together to make a marinade, then added the chicken and let it soak for about half an hour. While the chicken marinated, I filled my deep fryer with a half gallon of peanut oil and let it come up to 350 °F. When the chicken and oil were both ready, I dredged the chunks in the cornstarch.
I fried the chicken in batches of about a dozen chunks for four minutes per batch. I drained each batch on paper towels.
I garnished each plate of chicken with scallions and served cucumber sunomono on the side:
Hot, crispy, gingery nuggets served with a cool, acidic salad – it couldn’t get any simpler or tastier. He Who was greatly appreciative of my effort, but reminded me “when these braces come off, you’re back to making regular fried chicken.” He really has no idea how long that will take, but I’m happy to make this version whenever he wants.
Takoyaki
My introduction to takoyaki (octopus balls), a popular street food in Osaka, came from this episode of No Reservations:
Inspired by a late-night viewing of the show, I searched online for a takoyaki cooking appliance, and settled on this:
This solid hunk of divoted cast iron came with an oiling brush and the metal pick required to spin the batter around as it cooked. It also came with a recipe that was so poorly translated that I had to track down a better version, which I finally located at Bento.com. Unfortunately, I had no idea of the correct cooking temperature for the pan, and wound up burning everything. I boxed up the pan, stored it in the basement, and began my quest for the elusive electric takoyaki maker. I was prepared to have one of She Who Must Be Obeyed’s clients in Tokyo ship one to me when I finally located this model (a similar version is available at J-List):
I knew I had the right gizmo, the blue boxes read (left to right) ta – ko – ya – ki. The extra confirmation came from this hapy little fellow at the bottom:
The happy tako (octopus) seems to be a de rigeur motif for this snack, just like the robotic verson in Bourdain’s store window.
I plugged in the griddle and gathered my ingredients, using the same recipe as my first attempt: 450 ml of water, a four-inch square of konbu, 15 grams of katsuobushi (bonito flakes), 200 grams of flour, about twenty cooked shrimp, and a half cup of chopped scallions.
I made a dashi from the water, konbu, and katsuobushi, then whisked in the flour to make a smooth batter.
After oiling each of the wells, I added chunks of shrimp to the griddle. The shrimp, standing in for the boiled octopus I had failed to procure, meant I was making ebiyaki.
After dropping in a pinch of scallions, I filled each well with the batter.
This is when everything went (literally) pear-shaped: The batter was too thick, so it didn’t flow around the shrimp when added to the griddle, and it didn’t flow out of the cooked shell completely when flipped over.
The second batch was better, but still not as round as they should have been.
They passed the taste test, so I plated them up and topped them with Bull-Dog Sauce and chopped scallions. I didn’t have the proper mayonnaise – Kewpie – so I skipped that topping.
Eaten piping hot, these were fluffy, savory, sweet from the sauce, and had a chewy shrimp nugget buried inside. Even when they’re badly made, they’re good.
While gathering information for this post, I found this instructional video:
Everything I did wrong is addressed in that video: I need a thinner, colder batter. I should pour the batter in first, before adding the filling. I can be a lot less neat about filling the griddle, and the balls should only be rotated a quarter turn at a time. I plan on trying again soon, and also hope to improve my flipping technique. Maybe with practice I’ll get as good as this street vendor:
I’ve been told that the cast iron pan I have in storage is also sold as an ebelskiver pan, a utensil for making Danish filled pancakes. I’ll stick with the electric version, but I am considering  trying a sweet batter with a sweet filling. You may call the results ebelskivers, but I know better: they’re chocoyaki.
 by Charles Stross (Readercon 21 GoH) I read a prediction about “cultured meat extruders,†machines which sat in the kitchen and made “chicken†or other “meats†from tissue cultures, much in the same way we have bread machines. (Although they don’t so much manufacture the bread from raw feedstock as process ingredients.)
, a collection of predictions collected from the Popular Mechanics archives, the future of food was laid out over the course of a few decades:
, still the most thorough examination of the science behind what happens in the kitchen. Not only did he explain why recipes worked or failed, but he also debunked a lot of common kitchen myths. Read McGee and you learn will how recipes work, as well as how to fix them when they fail.
