Archive for May, 2007
Oysters Guggenheim Bilbao
Posted on May 19, 2007, under Food.
Chef Quique Dacosta of El Poblet restaurant in Spain has published an architectually-inspired recipe for oysters, which includes an “apparently” edible silver and titanium veil modeled on the sinuous metallic skin Frank Gehry designed for the Guggenheim Museum in Bilbao.
Photo by *mb**
A full, exuberant description:
The oyster never imagined it would end up being architecture, much less architecture so extravagant that it would be inspired by Frank Gehry’s museum in Bilbao. The sensible thing would have been to craft a rocky dish that echoed harmonies of the shell, but no, this dish takes on a galactic form and color. Galactic shellfish? Yes, and therein lies the madness: to take something so primitive, so basic, so wild, and give it a look from outer space. How? With titanium. Since when is titanium edible, you might ask? Apparently since now, because the only people dying at El Poblet are the ones that are keeling over from sheer pleasure, and it would seem that in that category there are many… Some swear it’s addictive. Others say it’s an aphrodisiac. What no one argues about is that we find ourselves before a most rare mating of elements. From what ancient recipe book did Quique Dacosta rob this idea? Is it true about the titanium or is it simply a strategy on the chef’s part to demonstrate how far he’s capable of going? True or not, it’s silver and titanium alloy, it shows all the signs, and that in itself is worthy of much merit.
However, if titanium and silver is the oyster, the oyster is also the oyster: warm, meaty, bursting with juices, drowning palates. What preparation does it undergo? It is simply warmed on the grill with a seasoning of juniper, and later dressed with four small cubes of lemon peel. It is placed over a gel made with the oyster itself, along with cockles, vegetables, and water, then gelatinized with aloe vera and lastly, to give it some color, the silver/titanium alloy is applied: a delicious gel that envelops the mollusk. This monumental construction is then crowned with a dried, crunchy version of that same gel that takes on the form of the Guggenheim museum.
For brave home chefs, the full recipe is here: Lo mejor de la gastronomia: Guggenheim Bilbao
The Experimental Cuisine Collective
Faculty members of New York University’s departments of nutrition, food studies, and public health and chemistry have joined forces with Will Goldfarb, chef-owner of Room 4 Dessert, in a collaborative working group that seeks to use scientific principles and experiments to produce advances in cooking. Through a series of workshops, the Experimental Cuisine Collective will discuss ways in which science may influence what we will be cooking and eating in the future, lead to a greater understanding of our diets, and contribute to safer food and better health across the globe.
The group’s goal is to develop a broad and rigorous approach to examine the properties, boundaries, and conventions of food, in a way that is intuitive and relevant to a broad audience. Five times a year, the participants will gather to explore notions of taste, texture, smell; boundaries of edible and inedible; and dining rituals and food taboos. Some of the questions the collective hopes to address include:
· Can scientific principles help determine which foods we enjoy?
· How can studying food help the public, from children to elderly, understand science?
· What technical and cultural foundations give rise to a new cuisine?
· How can the manipulation of chemical components of food alter notions of edible and inedible?
· How can education go from the classroom to the kitchen to the dining room in a way that best helps families understand how to make the right dietary choices?
Go there: The Experimental Cuisine Collective
Supercooled Drinks
The always-exciting food for design brings us this incredible video of supercooled water freezing into a “sorbet” after being poured into a glass. Food for design describes the process in more detail for use with sake.
Here’s another experiment in supercooling, this time done with a bottle of Corona.
Is There Such a Thing as Too Much Candy?
Posted on May 10, 2007, under Uncategorized.
A japanese artist couple buys an extra big candy ball and decides to film its ‘shrinking through licking’. They were licking, day after day, for about six months. Seasons changed, they moved around the globe, but they kept at it. Licking away.
Tattooed Fruit
– Photo credit: Sol Neelman for the New York Times
A pear is just a pear, except when it is also a laser-coded information delivery system with advanced security clearance.
And that is what pears – not to mention organic apples, waxy cucumbers and delicate peaches – are becoming in some supermarkets around the country. A new technology being used by produce distributors employs lasers to tattoo fruits and vegetables with their names, identifying numbers, countries of origin and other information that helps speed distribution. The marks are burned onto the outer layer of the skin and are visible to discerning consumers and befuddled cashiers alike.
The process, government approved and called safe by the industry, may sound sinister. But it was designed with the consumer in mind: laser coding could mean the end of those tiny stubborn stickers that have to be picked, scraped or yanked off produce.
That is from a New York Times story on the new practice of laser tattooing fruit with identification information.