My daughter, Maria (ICE Alumnus Culinary ’09) works as the Senior Sous Chef at Gordon Ramsey’s Bread Street Kitchen in London. The restaurant serves burgers and pig’s head, ceviche and king crab, expensive wines and great cocktails. The menu changes several times a year and Maria gets to choose new items. Although her kitchen doesn’t use many “modernist” ingredients, she wanted to learn more. I also felt I needed to get up to speed since I am focusing my attention on gluten/dairy free baking and often hydrocolloids like xanthan and guar gum are unavoidable.

So I reached out to my friend Tim Koerner, of Koerner Company, a bakery supply company in New Orleans. Tim’s strong allegiance to the pastry and culinary world has made him keenly aware of what’s hot in the food business. He’s a tireless globe trotter, who understands the importance of education and is generous not only with his time and energy but with products as well. He set us up with a private class at SOSA Ingredients in Catalunya, Spain and off we went!

The owner, Quico Sosa and his staff cheerfully met us and introduced us to their two corporate chefs, Sergei and Stephan, who would be our teachers for the next two days. They gave us a tour of the entire facility. They manufacture all kinds of emulsifiers, texturizers, aromas, color changing ingredients and other modern additions to the chefs’ pantry. They also supply chocolate, nut products and other standard ingredients, in addition to cool toys like Aladdin smokers and flexible molds. They had a program prepared for us, using about two dozen of their products. Edible paper and chicken with green asparagus skin were made with methyl cellulose, along with a bath for coating chocolate spheres to be made later. Egg-less creams and hot foams were made with a stabilizer called proespuma. Glicemul emusifier turned olive oil into butter, and praline paste into a firm, cutable consistency. Fruit-based mayonnaise was created with emulsionat en pasta, and a pasta dough-like mixture was made with carrot purée and promochi, based on kuzu root. Spherification and reverse spherification were demonstrated and de-mystified. We tasted, photographed, poked and prodded everything they put in front of us. Variations were viewed on the computer since the company’s website contains multiple how-to videos.

In all, the products have interesting applications. For Maria, menu ideas were coming to her like lightening bolts. She immediately thought of a sauce they make at BSK that always starts to separate during service. Without making an alien concoction, the sauce could be coaxed to last a few more hours.

For me, the uselfulness seems greater the more restricted the diet of the customer. A dessert containing a light sponge cake filled with mousse and topped with a crunchy tuile is difficult if the customer can’t eat eggs, nuts or dairy products. But with these ingredients, there is suddenly a pantry brimming with possibilities and customers on restricted diets shouldn’t have to be limited to a fruit plate with sorbet when they really want a plated dessert like everyone else at the table.

I returned to New York determined to experiment with these new products in recipes I am already making. Trial and error is the name of the game here, and I’m keeping careful notes. My five beautiful days in Barcelona have inspired me, in more ways than one.

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Well, it finally happened. After nearly a year of being a skeptical observer Chef Chris Gesualdi dragged me kicking and screaming into the big, scary world of Hydrocolloids. After poking and prodding around for a bit I realized something — it turns out it’s not so scary after all.

Hydrocolloids need a better publicist or an image consultant at the very least. They don’t have a flashy name or a description that rolls off the tongue. But those are things better left for someone smarter than me. There is a lot of necessary fear around “chemicals,” especially when it comes to food. So what are hydrocolloids, and why does everyone call them chemicals with a hint of terror in their voice?

The fact is that hydrocolloids simply refer to a category of substances that form a gel in the presence of water. What does that mean? Here are some examples of hydrocolloids and chemicals you might find in your own kitchen: Hydrocolloids commonly found in the kitchen are flour, cornstarch, pectin and gelatin. To assuage any fears you have, “chemicals “commonly found in the kitchen are baking soda and baking powder. More…

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Foods that have been properly prepared by cooking ‘en sous vide‘ can be magical. Sous-vide, the cooking method itself, is not magic. The cooking process for sous-vide is mostly unattended, but doing it right requires as much attention and practice as any other method.

When it comes to cooking sous-vide, you get out exactly what you put in. Whatever form or arrangement a protein is in when it enters the cooking bath becomes its permanent shape when cooked. In other words if you put a crumpled up mess of chicken breast in a bag to cook sous-vide, you’ll wind up with a crumpled up mess to serve. Beyond determining the exact times and temperatures you should cook your food at, you have to carefully consider what shape you want your proteins to have. So let’s take a look at the possibilities with a chicken breasts. All chicken was cooked at 143˚F (62˚C) for 45 minutes. More…

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It’s Super Bowl week and I find myself thinking less about the match-up on the field and more about what I’m going to eat during the game. Recently I’ve been working on the Ultimate Make-at-Home Buffalo Wings. It’s the perfect recipe for your own Super Bowl party, guaranteed not to set your oven fire (yes, there’s a story there). But as I been preparing for ICE’s first sous-vide seminar, I decided to see if technology could help us build a better chicken “wing”. Here’s the play-by-play…

Brine First
There’s nothing technologically advanced about brining, but there are some things you shouldn’t mess with. Whether you making chicken for a Tuesday night dinner or a pull-out-all-the-stops, completely-impractical-but-delicious batch of buffalo wing, brining has major advantages. An overnight soak in a brine leaves meat juicier and more flavorful after cooking. Vacuum packing (sous-vide-ing) meat in a bag with a brine helps the brine to penetrate the meat more completely. After sealing the chicken legs in a sous-vide bag, they rest in the refrigerator overnight so the brine can work its magic. The chicken may then be cooked in the bag with the brine. For very tender meat that could easily be pulled from bone, the chicken was cooked at 151˚F (66˚C) for 4 hours.

Perfect Chicken Brine
6 chicken legs
500 grams buttermilk
20 grams fine sea salt
15 grams sugar
4 grams smoked paprika

Combine the buttermilk, salt, sugar and paprika in a bowl and whisk until dissolved. Pour over the chicken and leave to marinate overnight. More…

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ICE‘s first official class on sous-vide cooking is just one month away. Now that our sous-vide curriculum has a foundation of really solid technique, I’ve begun to introduce some of the methods to my students whenever we have a few extra moments in class. This week we worked on short ribs. I wanted to take a look at two flavor profiles that are worlds apart — Korean Short Ribs and a Pastrami-Style Rib (those who are frequent readers may remember Pastrami Short Ribs). But I didn’t want to just lift someone’s recipe, I wanted to put my own spin on it. More…

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If you stick your head into any classroom here at ICE you’ll see instant read thermometers crammed into the sleeve pockets of nearly every culinary arts student in the room. But peek into the kitchen of any of the nation’s top restaurants and you’ll see far fewer, in fact you might only find them tucked away in a knife roll somewhere, to be removed on the rarest circumstance.

Why the difference? Ego, mostly.

When cooks are first being trained, they must rely on thermometers to determine doneness of cooked meats. After you’ve sautéed 100 chicken breasts or grilled 100 steaks, you start to get the hang of it. You learn how a properly cooked piece of meat feels, you understand the time-heat ratio that leads to proper cooking, and it becomes second nature. You practice and practice and practice, so that before long you’re consistently turning perfectly cooked meats. No longer do you rely on a thermometer. It’s an archaic badge of honor. You’re confident in yourself and you’re ability as a cook; you don’t need anyone or anything to tell you when a piece of meat is properly cooked. More…

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What makes an attractive plate?

Seems like an easy question, but the more you think about the answer, the more complicated it becomes. After all, who’s to say what is or isn’t attractive? While beauty does lie in ‘the eye of the beholder,’ there are certainly ways of putting food on to a plate that ‘only a mother could love.’

This week I decided to take a look at one dish and play with different ways of getting the same ingredients on the plate to see if I could figure out the ultimate answer to “What makes an attractive plate?” To my surprise I found more than one answer.

First up, the dish:

Crab Salad with Yellow Curry Cream, Watermelon, Avocado and Lime

It’s an ingredient list that satisfies 3 of the 4 benchmarks of a good plate. There’s Color — red, yellow, green and white; Texture — tender, crisp, creamy, soft; Flavor — which if I do (humbly) say so myself, was quite good; and the manipulated variable would be Shape — what form will each ingredient take and how do they land on the plate? If I do it right the result should look too good to eat.

More…

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Sometimes looking for answers in the kitchen leads me to more questions than I started with. I love it when that happens.

Like with my most recent round of sous-vide testing on lamb legs. Specifically yogurt-marinated, grilled lamb legs. Last week, my wife grilled yogurt marinated lamb for dinner… in our tiny New York apartment. The meal was delicious but when we woke up the next morning and the whole place still smelled like freshly grilled lamb (not so great over coffee!). I started to think, there must be a better way.

My first thought was if I could precook the lamb, sous-vide, then it would only need a few minutes on the grill, thus reducing our post lamb grilling air freshener budget exponentially. It seemed simple enough — precook lamb, flash on grill for just moments, perfectly cooked lamb with minimal stink. Everybody wins.

Further, I thought, the lamb should come out more tender and flavorful. Besides enhancing flavor, the yogurt marinade helps tenderize the meat, and vacuum sealing the meat should help the marinade penetrate more deeply. And then to to test the limits of tenderness, we set up one piece to marinate in buttermilk instead of yogurt to see if there was an effect on tenderness. And so we had four test groups:

#1 — boneless lamb leg, yogurt marinade, cooked 62˚C 90 minutes
#2 — boneless lamb leg, yogurt marinade, cooked 62˚C 45 minutes
#3 — boneless lamb leg, buttermilk marinade, cooked 62˚C, 90 minutes
#4 — boneless lamb leg, yogurt marinade, grilled to 140˚F

All three pieces of meat that were cooked sous-vide went through the proper cook-chill process, then held for one day for tasting. For the taste test, the sous-vide meats were rewarmed in a 120˚F water bath before the bags were opened and placed on a very hot grill until the exterior was just browned, about 90 seconds per side. All meats were left to rest 5 minutes before slicing. More…

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We make our living behind the stove. Day-in, day-out chefs sweat it out in the kitchen, ensuring that others are well-fed and having a great time at the table. So you would think that on their day off chefs would stay far away from the kitchen and the thought of cooking. After all, how many surgeons do you know that operate in their spare time?

Give a chef a day out of the kitchen and he (or she) will be thrilled. He’ll happily let someone else cook for him — even if that means grilled cheese sandwiches with a side of potato chips (but only if they’re kettle cooked). But give a chef a week off and you’re bound to find him back in the kitchen after 24 hours. And so goes my story with a week in Watercolor, FL just down the road from my hometown, Pensacola. A big beach house with the entire family, means lots of time to cook and plenty of willing mouths to eat. More…

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We made our way down the hall of an empty schoolhouse, shouts of Italian, then laughter followed by more shouting echoed through the hall. The men on the other side of the wall were either about to rip each other’s throats out or in middle of the funniest story ever told. My Italian is no good so it could have been either.

Inside the room were three long tables in the shape of a ‘U’ each table dressed with a different cloth — red, white and green — like the Italian flag. After a brief introduction from our host, “something, something, something ‘Americanos’ something, something” we were greeted with a rousing ‘Ay’ and plastic cups filled with wine hoisted in the air. The average age in the room was 50+ and it turns out all the shouting was over who among them was the worst soccer player.

On our final night in Italy, where we received training in the culinary art of sous vide, we had been invited to be a part of this group’s long-standing tradition. Once a week, they get together after work. If the weather is good they might play a game of soccer, but the evening is really about the meal together. They meet at the same school they all attended as children, prepare the food in the school’s kitchen and set their patriotic tables in the adjacent classroom. More…

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