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http://www.popsci.com/popsci/technology/30a9f39472685110vgnvcm1000004eecbccdrcrd.html
THE FUTURE OF FOOD
Doctor Delicious
Ted Allen
For a closer look at the amazing high-tech gadgets found in the kitchens of
today's most adventurous professional chefs—as well as some ingenious tools
you can use at home—launch the photo gallery here
Dave Arnold would like to fix you a gin and tonic. Sound good? It will be.
It will be very, very good. It will be like no gin and tonic you have ever
seen or tasted in your life. It will also be considerably more involved,
shall we say, than cracking open the Tanqueray and Schweppes.
First, Arnold believes, he must clarify the lime juice. Why? Because his
uncompromising conception of culinary perfection requires that gin and
tonics be completely, crystalline clear, that's why. And so, from a closet
in the back of a teaching kitchen at the French Culinary Institute in New
York City, behind a door labeled Caution: Nitrous Oxide in Use, Arnold
wheels out a cart piled high with laboratory equipment—a rotary evaporator
(rotovap) that he salvaged from Eli Lilly on eBay, cheap, and that he has
jerry-rigged for just this sort of thing. At his side, FCI chef and V.P.
Nils Noren supports a somewhat wobbly condenser as Arnold pours a liter of
freshly squeezed lime juice, pale green and cloudy with pulp, into a
teardrop-shaped Pyrex vessel. Because heat would destroy the flavors and
aromas of the elixir, Arnold brings the vessel just above room temperature
by partially submerging it in a bath of precisely regulated warm water. He
then connects it to a vacuum so that the juice will vaporize at low
temperatures.
Arnold flips the switch. The machine gurgles and hums, the vessel spins
merrily, the lime vapor drifts up into the condenser, and an absolutely
clear liquid begins dripping into a beaker. The result smells like lime, but
it's lost much of its punchy flavor in distillation. So Arnold works to
bring his clarified juice back into balance. From a series of plastic
bottles, he adds 4.5 percent powdered citric acid, 1.5 percent malic acid
and 0.1 percent succenic acid to the solution, places the beaker atop an
electromagnetic stirrer, drops in a little Teflon-coated magnetic bar, and
flips the switch. Instantly, the bar begins spinning, whipping up the liquid
and dissolving the powders. Voilà! Clearlime, Arnold calls it. A touch of
quinine powder and some simple syrup (2:1 sugar and water), some water, and,
after a couple hours of labor, he's halfway there.
Now he custom-makes his own "gin," really just a neutral spirit infused with
whatever aromatics are catching Arnold's fancy and then distilled (the
latter part of which is, in fact, illegal—but hey, it's all in the name of
science). Today it will be two cucumbers, celery ribs, roasted orange
slices, and one bunch each of cilantro and Thai basil, all coarsely chopped
and added to a fifth of Absolut vodka. Everything goes into the vessel and
back onboard the rotovap, and another beaker is filled.
The two liquids are combined about 1:1, heavily carbonated with a healthy
injection of CO2 (Arnold loves carbonation), and chilled for 20 minutes to a
blistering cold in a freezer (he hates it when ice melts in his drinks). And
so, sans rocks, sans garnish, Arnold pours the concoction into champagne
flutes and serves it.
"I like my drinks stiff," he notes, and he is not kidding. This take on the
G&T is, literally and figuratively, a distillation of the classic's flavors.
It's a pure, Platonic ideal of the G&T, strong as a martini. The sensation
is not so much of drinking something as it is of breathing it, the
effervescence unusually intense and refreshing, the flavors and aromas
magnified, permeating the palate and nose with a sharp, aggressive, limey
crispness, underscored with soft notes of cilantro, roasted orange and cuke.
And it only took three hours.
"It's a crazy level of things you have to do to get the product I want,"
Arnold says, "but here's what happens when you do everything possible to get
something the way you want it. Yeah, sure, it's ridiculous, but. . . "
You should see how he cooks a steak. Bigger Motors
Dave Arnold is the man behind the curtain of today's hottest movement in
cooking, molecular gastronomy. He's the Q to James Bond as embodied by
esteemed mad-scientist chef Wylie Dufresne. A former paralegal, performance
artist and, briefly, Domino's Pizza driver, Arnold has become the go-to
gearhead for machines and techniques to help chefs realize their wildest
culinary fantasies. And wild they are: Carbonated watermelon. Gelatin
spheres with liquid centers that pop in your mouth. Broths and sauces
whipped into foams. Shrimp flesh extruded into "noodles." Hot-center
desserts with exteriors flash-frozen by liquid nitrogen. Vanilla beans
sizzled tableside with lasers. (It should be noted that Arnold disapproves
of sizzling things tableside with lasers, because of safety concerns—which,
for reasons that will soon become clear, is funny.)
All those culinary pyrotechnics can't happen without a lot of R&D. That's
Arnold's specialty. The 36-year-old, salt-and-pepper haired, wildly
enthusiastic food lover is part artist, part scientist, part self-taught
machinist and, of course, exuberant cook. Armed with a B.A. in philosophy
from Yale and an MFA from Columbia but largely self-taught in the areas of
cooking and engineering, he was hired at FCI in 2005 as director of culinary
technology, a new department augmenting the school's traditional instruction
with scientific techniques, tools and rigor. He instantly became one of the
most popular instructors there.
Perhaps that popularity has something to do with his unbridled excitement at
the power of technology to create deliciousness. Take, for example, how he
goes about improving the immersion blender—the handheld blender "stick" that
allows cooks to puree foods in saucepots and bowls. For Arnold's purposes,
the blenders on the market are far too weak, so he rigged one together using
an 18-volt battery and the motor from a DeWalt cordless drill, resulting in
a stick blender as strong as a commercial milkshake machine. "Just
unbelievably powerful," he says. "I get such a huge vortex, I can make stuff
as smooth as you can in a Vita-Mix."
Or consider his take on the humble corn dog. "The problem with them is, one,
you don't get that high-heat, cooked flavor in the sausage, and two, the
batter is never cooked right next to the sausage." His vision, inspired by a
classic German cake called baumkuchen, which is baked in layers on a
rotating spit: Skewer the dogs on a rotisserie, get a little char on them,
and then apply batter in thin coats so that each one is perfectly cooked.
It's this kind of ingenuity that has propelled him into the kitchens of the
most celebrated chefs cooking today. On a given afternoon, he could be
showing David Chang how to carbonate sake at one of Chang's Momofuku
restaurants in New York, or creating a syringe for Johnny Iuzzini, the
pastry chef at Jean-Georges, also in New York, to layer a hot flavored
gelatin atop a cold one for a modern take on the pousse-café. Or ripping
apart his espresso machine and modifying it to mimic a hand-pulled shot.
"He's nothing shy of a genius," says chef Charlie Trotter, of the legendary
Chicago restaurant that bears his name, who met Arnold at a fusion-cooking
conference in Madrid last year. "He's helping chefs take their food to the
next level." Try Anything
Poised with a lance and wearing a welding jacket, his wife at the ready with
her camera, Dave Arnold is preparing to face off with a dragon. Actually,
with a snow blower. A snow blower that he has mounted on a tripod and rigged
to spray flaming kerosene vapor. At himself.
This is during art school, you'll understand.
"The idea was that if I could jam the lance into where the blower was going,
I could stop the blower and I would win," he explains. Instead, the dragon
won, and Arnold was engulfed in flames. "I learned that what happens when
you catch on fire is you don't 'stop, drop, and roll,' " Arnold says. "You
start running around to try to get away from yourself. Luckily, I had a
bunch of friends there who tackled me. I ended up having to go to the
hospital."
Arnold's typical projects, though no less extreme, aren't always quite so
hazardous. Harold McGee, author of the seminal 1984 classic on the science
of the kitchen, On Food and Cooking, recalls a long day spent with Arnold
trolling exotic markets all over Manhattan, solely because Arnold insisted
that McGee experience an ingredient he had just discovered: giant-water-bug
essence from Thailand. "It smells like a combination of really strong pear
aroma with a little bit of nail polish in the background," McGee says. "He
just wants to find everything and experience everything."
That kind of fearless curiosity came early. Growing up as an only child
(until the age of 15) in the New York area, Arnold says, "I ate everything."
He also took up culinary experimentation early. Aside from his childhood
specialty, chicken cooked in parchment with his own proprietary spice mix,
he was the self-styled "breakfast king," getting up early on weekends to
make breakfast in bed for his parents. Among his more ambitious adventures:
deep-fried beignets. "Looking back," he notes, "I don't think fifth graders
should deep-fry by themselves while their parents are asleep."
Arnold has tech in his genes: His mother is a doctor and his father an
engineer, as were both of his grandfathers. He had always imagined an
academic career in science. But at Yale, he went with liberal-arts
coursework, attributing the decision to boredom and "a little bit of A.D.D."
As a junior, he started dating the woman who is now his wife—Jennifer
Carpenter, then an architecture student interning with Cesar Pelli—and
thought it might be smart to dabble in coursework related to her field
"because then I would have something else to talk to her about." So he
signed up for a sculpting class. "They taught me how to weld, and I was
like, 'This is amazing.' I was like, 'What? I can make big things from metal
that move and spin?' "
He fell in love with building machinery. He also decided to go to art
school. While at Columbia, food occasionally found its way into his work—one
performance piece he contemplated was fashioning a model of the city
Nagasaki from gingerbread and blowing it to pieces.
As it happens, the work with arc welders and flaming snow blowers proved to
be useful training. In the late 1990s, he and Carpenter moved into an
illegal loft on 38th Street that lacked a kitchen. Using a dorm fridge, a
hotplate and a utility sink from Home Depot, he created a rollaway kitchen
that could be hidden in case the landlord came sniffing around. When Arnold
and Carpenter noticed that the landlord never actually did come around, they
became emboldened—and Arnold discovered restaurant-equipment auctions.
"The first thing I bought was a double-glass sliding-door deli case" for
$65, he recalls. "That thing changed my life. You could see all the food in
it. I had a party once—and this was before I had a soft-serve machine—and I
had something like eight cases of soft-serve, five cases of beer, three
cases of champagne, a ham, a turkey and all the noshes for everything, and
the thing wasn't even full." Soon thereafter, he bought a four-gallon
commercial deep fryer from a shuttered Mexican joint in the financial
district and rolled it home on a hand truck—in the snow. Then he got a
commercial broiler, known in the trade as a salamander. Then a convection
oven. He also began customizing his equipment, starting when the salvaged
convection oven didn't perform to his liking.
It was around this time that he discovered WD-50, Wylie Dufresne's acclaimed
experimental restaurant on the Lower East Side of Manhattan. Arnold quickly
became a regular. He asked Dufresne for a kitchen tour, the two hit it off,
and before long, they became friends. (It didn't hurt that Dufresne had
become interested in Arnold's sister-in-law Maile Carpenter, who he had met
in her capacity then as Time Out New York's food editor; the two are now
engaged.)
"He was the one who said, 'You can take your tech and machine knowledge and
your cooking knowledge and bring them together," Arnold says. Dufresne was
(and still is) interested in sous vide and other methods of cooking food
slowly in liquids, at low temperatures, until the exact moment it is done.
Early in his work with Arnold, he complained that doing so with traditional
equipment was too difficult. Indeed, it is virtually impossible to keep
water at a constant, very low temperature for hours and hours on a stovetop.
Dufresne asked Arnold if he could find him an immersion circulator, a
thermostated water bath common to the most rudimentary chemist's workshop.
Arnold replied, "Well, I don't know what one is, but I guarantee I can get
it." He took Dufresne's money and started scouring eBay. A collaboration was
born.
I recently toured WD-50's kitchen to get a look at the arsenal of tools that
Arnold has made or modified and that have become essential to Dufresne's
cutting-edge cuisine. Observing that fish proteins coagulate at 125 to 135
degrees ("That's when the muscle begins to contract and squeeze out that
white, milky stuff, and that's when fish begins to dry out"), Dufresne told
Arnold that he wanted to cook fish very slowly in a moist environment until
the precise moment it reached those temperatures, in a much
lower-temperature environment than the 212 degrees necessary to create
steam. Arnold took parts from a humidifier, which converts water to vapor
with sonic pulses rather than heat, added a heating coil to produce the
moderate temperatures Dufresne was after, and, in effect, built him what is
now called a vapor oven years before they were widely available. "And so,"
Dufresne says, "we're able to cook a moister piece of fish."
Nearby, sous-chef Jeffrey Fisher is experimenting with a vacuum fryer,
modified by Arnold with a condenser and hoses to remove water vapor. The
vacuum permits liquids to boil at much lower temperatures, a property that
Fisher is exploring to fry chips of apple, garlic and potato in oil without
browning them. "The goal is, green things stay green, white fruit chips stay
white, that sort of thing," Fisher says. Unfortunately, he notes, the fryer
is still retaining too much moisture—you can see droplets condensing on the
underside of the clear lid—and as such, the chips are coming out squishy.
Arnold took one look at the problem and announced that the lid should be
dome-shaped rather than flat, so that water droplets would slide to the edge
rather than falling on the food.
Not long after he began tinkering with Dufresne's equipment, Arnold was
working up a proposal for a food museum and writing stories for Food Arts
magazine. Editor Michael Batterbury noticed his interest in technology and
tapped Arnold to write equipment reviews. Then, two years ago,
administrators at the French Culinary Institute (Dufresne's alma mater)
decided to create a new department focused on molecular gastronomy and went
looking for a department head. Batterbury recommended Arnold for the job.
"You don't want a chef to do this position," Arnold says. "You want someone
who can figure out what the chef really wants, talk to the science and tech
people, and be the liaison between the two. That's what I do here." Magic
Meat Glue
Perhaps the most fun to be had with experimental cooking comes from the
magic potions known as hydrocolloids, a class of ingredients familiar to
anyone who's perused the labels of processed foods—cellulose, xanthan gum,
agar, alginate, carrageenan, gelatin—but that, until recently (with the
exception of gelatin), were not a fine cook's ingredients. Generally,
hydrocolloids are used to thicken, gel, or stabilize liquids; they can also
be used to great effect to change texture, enabling a chef to produce a foam
that won't collapse or, in Arnold's case, to make a "sponge cake" with
methyl cellulose that can be shot from a compressed whipped-cream canister
onto a plate without requiring baking.
Despite their negative associations with junk food, most hydrocolloids
actually come from natural sources. Agar and carrageenan are derived from
seaweed, gelatin from cow and pig bones, and pectin from citrus and apples.
Some of these additives, such as agar, a common thickener in Thai cooking,
have been around for centuries; others, like transglutaminase (known in the
industry as "meat glue") are newer and can be used for some pretty out-there
stuff—attaching chicken skin to a piece of fish, say, or gluing a piece of
skate wing to a slab of pork belly. In his appearance on Iron Chef in 2005,
Dufresne used transglutaminase to bind pureed fish into "noodles," which
were toothsome and delicious, not to mention clever. (Full disclosure: I
served as a judge on that episode. I voted for Dufresne to win, but my
colleagues overruled me and gave the nod to Mario Batali.)
"The problem," Arnold says, "is these [additives] have been used for decades
to make products with a longer shelf life, to reduce the fat, to make
something that you can freeze, to make something that ships farther, to make
something that's cheaper. And these are all things that, in the end, reduce
quality. Chefs have started looking at these ingredients as a quality
enhancer, something to be proud of. Most of the top people are using these
products, because they make food better. Hardly any of them talk about it,
because it sounds gross. There are a couple of people who, like Wylie, they
talk about using these things because they love the products and they're
trying to rehabilitate their image. So there's use of these products for
economy, and there's use for effect, and these chefs are using it for
effect."
"Sometimes it's just about learning," Dufresne says. "It's about
understanding. That's why bringing traditional chefs together with
scientists is infinitely interesting, because even if, at the very least,
all they do is help explain things, and help us understand what's happening
while we cook, then we're becoming better cooks."
The New Ways
When FCI hired Arnold, the plan was to build him a lab, which has yet to
happen—he has his closet and a cubicle, and he scavenges most of his
equipment used. ("I picked up a really good vacuum controller for cheap
because some sucker listed it in the wrong category!") He's now in the
market for a centrifuge, figuring that it will speed up the
juice-clarification process, and he particularly dreams of getting a deal on
a 3-D rapid-prototyping machine. Budget is an issue, not to mention the
storage constraints of the two-bedroom apartment he shares with his wife and
two young sons on the Lower East Side.
Down the road, Arnold is hatching plans to open the ultimate high-tech
cocktail bar with pastry chef Iuzzini, focusing not on the retro, golden-age
drinks favored by most mixological temples but on an ultra-modern paradigm:
still wines and juices carbonated to order with tongue-tingling intensity;
rows of magnetic stirrers merrily whirling people's drinks in a chilling
bath; rotovapping herbs and fruit for intense flavors; bourbon with soft,
sweet nitrous-oxide bubbles; extremely cold drinks without the corruption of
ice, super-chilled cocktail stirrers. . . . "There are always new things you
can do that are really delicious that no one is trying," Arnold says,
"because they're so hyped up on getting back to some other place."
To his mind, this kind of problem-solving isn't any sort of radical culinary
departure. "People ask, 'Is this a fad?' I hope that the idea of trying to
use everything at your disposal to make something better is never considered
a fad, you know?" As Dufresne puts it, "I mean, an oven is technology. At
one point, people were throwing sticks at animals and holding them over a
spit, and that was a huge breakthrough."
McGee harkens back to Arnold's relentless quest for the perfect G&T. "He has
this ideal of the french fry, the gin and tonic, so many things, and he's
always trying to get to that ideal," he says. But ultimately, McGee
ventures, he himself would probably prefer the old-fashioned kind: "For me,
a gin and tonic is a tall drink that you sip. It's not a martini; it's a
drink to quench your thirst. So I kind of like the standard one, with some
Schweppes. I like the bursts of acidity from those little lime bits."
Of course, he knows, "if I were having this conversation with Dave, he would
be saying, 'Well, if you like those little bursts of acidity, we can put
some gelatin pearls in there, infused with Clearlime, so that whenever you
bite one . . ."
Ted Allen is a frequent judge on Top Chef and Iron Chef America, the food
and wine expert on Queer Eye, and the author of The Food You Want to Eat.
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