I'd been looking forward to Heston Blumenthal Live for months, a "one night only" event (Saturday 5 May in Auckland) starring the award-winning celebrity chef which included New Zealand for the first time. I had no idea what to expect, other than what I had read in a news article, so I was ready to be surprised and delighted by the "extravaganza".
Tickets and a souvenir from the show.
It started off well, with Heston cooling a meringue with liquid nitrogen to the sound of dramatic music, which he then fed to host Mike Hosking. I also enjoyed hearing about the chef's past, how he worked 120-hour weeks with just a pot washer and two front-of-house staff, after starting up his own restaurant (The Fat Duck) with only two weeks' experience in someone else's kitchen. I held my breath when he told us about his first big reservation, a table of eight booked six or eight weeks in advance, and how disaster struck at 7:30pm on the evening of the dinner. And I was impressed by video clips of some of his exquisite dishes being made: mock turtle soup being shaped into the form of a gold-plated fob watch, as well as the construction of a very thin tart which looks like a Queen of Hearts playing card, both in keeping with an Alice in Wonderland theme.
Fob watch tea bag and Queen of Hearts tart (photos from Popcorn & Toast).
I enjoyed the show, and I admired the man's talent, but I couldn't help feeling just a little bit disappointed. We didn't really learn anything new (sous vide and other techniques were barely mentioned), there weren't any cooking demonstrations (unless you counted the making of ice cream using dry ice), and there were no practical cooking tips as promised in an interview with Viva. Heston's thoughts on eating as a multi-sensory experience, including the difference between taste and flavour, are already widely available online. In fact, his talk with Paul O'Grady was pretty much what we witnessed last night, with the exception that we were not shown either of the demonstrations in the talk show.
Having to sit through multiple advertisements did not help either (did they need all these sponsors when we were paying hundreds of dollars for a ticket?). The audience participation activities (which you were excluded from unless you were sitting at the front downstairs) were cheesy, with plenty of fake reactions from those on the stage. The questions at the end were pre-selected rather than spontaneous. To add to the disappointment, news reports claimed that Heston took us through his "logic-defying hot and iced tea" and his "famous snail porridge", when in fact he did not mention these dishes at all.
Despite thinking the show could have been much better, there were a few things which made the evening worthwhile. It put the scale of Heston's work into perspective. We discovered, for instance, that the Fat Duck gets 30,000 calls per day, and they need to have two people dedicated to reservations for the 42 customers that they can fit into the restaurant. We also learnt that the chef is helping prepare a 5-course menu for 13,000 guests at the Queen's Diamond Jubilee next month.
I have now been motivated to watch many episodes of Heston's Feasts, which are both entertaining and inspirational. Although I would not pay so much money to see Heston live again, it is nice to be able to say I was in the same room as someone of his calibre. Hopefully, I will someday be able to experience his creations for myself too.
I'd heard plenty of good things about the degustation dinner at Cocoro, so when Valentine's Day rolled around, it was the perfect opportunity to give it a go. I usually find that such dinners present far too much food for one person to eat, and this was no exception. The problem is, the dishes taste so good you don't want to let them go to waste.
The seafood, such as the blue fin tuna (sustainably farmed in Japan), was exceptional, but I was particularly happy to be able to taste some ingredients I have never seen before. On top of the beautifully light and crispy courgette filo tempura, which looked like a bird's nest, there was some "mountain caviar". The waitress assured us this was vegetarian, and the menu called it "belvedere fruit". I didn't even know such a thing existed. It didn't taste like much, but I guess it's used as a garnish (the Japanese call it tonburi and it's apparently a delicacy of the Akita prefecture) because of its caviar-like texture.
One third of the third course: Courgette filo tempura, Worcestersire sauce, egg tartare, belvedere fruit or "mountain caviar".
While Cocoro is a Japanese restaurant, the chef also uses plenty of New Zealand ingredients, from the karengo seaweed sprinkles to the whitebait in the chawanmushi. For the first time ever, I was also able to try eating a piko piko frond. This Maori fern shoot tasted like a bitter green bean or asparagus.
From the vegetarian degustation menu: Summer vegetable tempura of courgette flower, piko piko, eggplant and baby carrot with micro mizuna, karengo and cauliflower in white vinegar dressing.
6-course degustation dinner ($80) at Cocoro
56a Brown Street, Ponsonby
(09) 360 0927
Sundays and Mondays closed.
Tuesdays to Saturdays 12 - 2pm and 5:30 - 10pm
While wandering around the streets of Ponsonby, I found myself in what looked like a well presented dairy, with fresh flowers outside and spacious aisles inside. It had no sign on the door, so it wasn't until I bought something that I discovered this was Bhana Brothers, a family business that has existed for over 70 years now.
Apart from the handmade tortas de aceite (Sevillian olive oil wafers) which Anna from Eats By Anna had raved about, and other upmarket products like Clevedon buffalo cheese, this shop has fruit I haven't seen for sale before, not even at my local Nosh Food Market. I call them exotic for this reason, though plenty of New Zealand families have figs and cape gooseberries (I first knew of them as "physalis") growing in their (grandma's) backyards. Presumably figs aren't often sold because they don't transport or keep well, and I had never come across the very sweet and green little spheres called greengages before.
Greengages, fresh fig and cape gooseberries from Bhana Brothers.
Other fruits on the shelf which I was impressed to see, but less excited by, included pomelos, kiwiberries and horned melons (or kiwanos), as well as fresh blueberries, raspberries and blackberries. Not your average dairy, that's for sure!
[Added 3 March 2012: Found cape gooseberries and greengages slightly cheaper at a grocer called Kumeu Produce Market (407 State Highway 16, Kuneu) as well today.]
Someone told me about a little farm not far from central Auckland, where they make their own goats cheese, so I naturally had to check it out. To get to Crescent Dairy Goats, you basically drive to the end of the Northwestern motorway and turn left before you get to Taupaki (turn off before Kumeu). From there, it's pretty well signposted.
The softest cheese they had at this time of the year, which they called "Flat White", was delicious, creamy and mild. They have a whole range of goats cheeses, including blue cheese, and I chose to try their "Farmhouse Sting" next, so named because the cheese is marbled with nettle leaves, which is apparently safe to eat in the cheese, though you shouldn't go around munching on fresh nettle.
Two of many varieties of goats cheese for sale at Crescent Dairy Goats.
They offer a tour of the farm for $15 (minimum of 10 people required), where you get to meet the goats, have a tour of the milking and cheese making areas, then sit down for a taste of at least ten of their cheeses with tasting notes and commentary from the cheesemaker. I haven't got around to it yet, but I am definitely planning to round some people up for this!
If you thought FISH was just a simple seafood restaurant, any such illusions are immediately dispelled when the waiter brings out ciabatta rolls with what looks like a pale green mousse on the side. This turns out to be a very soft and light spread made from olive oil emulsified overnight using the enzymes from some kind of tree sap.
From this beginning, the mouthful of brocolli soup served in a flat glass tube, or the oysters with balsamic and chilli sauce in eye droppers, or even the fish and chips with what looks like rice bubbles in the batter, should no longer be a surprise.
They really turned up the heat though, or cold, rather, when I ordered the nitro toffee & coffee mousse, which became a full scale performance. A side table was set up so that we could see the swirling mist from the liquid nitrogen cooling a ball of mousse, injected with the filling before our eyes. The outside of the ball solidified, while the inside was still gooey.
Preparing the nitro toffee & coffee mousse.
Mousse ball ripped apart.
Yes, it's gimmicky, but the flavours are right up there, and it's nice to try something like this at least once.
Although I will be going down to Wellington for the tail end of their annual food festival Wellington on a Plate, I was sorely disappointed that I would miss out on the lecture by Professor Kent Kirschenbaum of New York University titled A Plate of Molecules: Chemical Gastronomy. Quite apart from the fact that I am only spending a weekend in the capital, and the lecture is on a Wednesday, the tickets for the talk sold out months ago. So, it was like all my Christmasses had come at once when I discovered only a few days ago that he would also be presenting in Auckland. Unfortunately, there was so little advertising of the lecture, brought to us by the New Zealand Institute of Chemistry as part of the celebrations for the International Year of Chemistry 2011, that the room was less than half full!
No matter, for those of you that didn't manage to make it for whatever reason, I hereby give you my version of events.
Professor Kirschenbaum started off by playing a video of the New Shimmer commercial, a 1976 parody aired on Saturday Night Live. You can watch it here (from 02:49). In the skit, the same product is used both as a floor wax and a dessert topping. Is this possible?
Basically, we are looking for a substance which is an edible soap. Soap is an amphiphile, with both water-loving and fat-loving properties. It turns out there is a class of chemical compounds, called saponins, which suits our purposes exactly. Saponins are phytochemicals, which means they can be extracted from plants. In fact, the word "saponin" is derived from a plant called soapwort, a.k.a "Bouncing Bet".
The two major commercial sources of saponins are Quillaja saponaria (soapbark tree) and Yucca schidigera (another desert plant), but saponins can also be found in everyday food items, as you can see from the foam when you soak chickpes, for instance. They are often added to drinks such as root beer to give them a foamy "head".
Professor Kirschenbaum proceeded to attempt to make his own "New Shimmer' using the following recipe:
3mL Quillaja saponaria extract
70mL water
5mL lemon juice
When he whisked these things together in a bowl, it began to turn into foam. This could be used as a mild cleanser or shampoo, as he demonstrated by smearing the bubbles onto his shirt and through his hair.
He then added a bit of sugar to make the foam more palatable, and gave it to an enthusiastic young volunteer from the room to sample. Only then did he mention the bitter aftertaste. The child pulled a face.
Actually, the idea of making a foamy dessert using a saponin is not new. In Aleppo in the Middle East, they make a white, fluffy, meringue-like dip called natef, commonly eaten with a semolina cookie called karabij, using something commonly translated as soapwort root.
(As an aside, did you know that licorice is made from the root of Glycyrrhiza glabra? It contains glycyrrhizic acid which is 50 times sweeter than sugar.)
Can something further be done with the foam? For instance, a NZ company called Angel Food sells a product called Vegan Meringue Cookie Mix. Could we also make an eggless meringue? The answer is yes, though the result is not quite the same as a real meringue, and one of Professor Kirschenbaum's assistants in New York spent ages piping the foam and baking it for us to try. (Not sure how the speaker managed to bring so many over, but we ate some after the lecture and the "meringue" bites did indeed have a bitter aftertaste. You also have to keep them dry as the ones I tried to take away melted into my hand.) Professor Kirschenbaum was going to try to bake a pavlova with the foam in Wellington, but thought he was going to fail, because pavlova has a complex texture, crunchy on the outside and soft on the inside (can anyone in Wellington let us know how that went?).
The Quillaja saponaria eggless meringue had a bitter aftertaste and drew moisture from my hand
natural. Look at the popularity of the Slow Food Movement and the numbers of the farm-to-table advocates. Just because something is natural, however, does not mean it is good for you.
Take smoke for instance. We like the flavour of smoked fish, meats, and cheeses, so what is actually in smoke? Molecules such as guaiacol, camphor and eugenol help provide an attractive flavour profile, but smoke also contains anthracene, pyrene and benzo(a)pyrene, which are not only 100% natural, but 100% carcinogenic.
If you live in an apartment, you wouldn't be able to use a smoker anyway. You could, however, add a smoky flavour to your food using something called liquid smoke, a substance produced from passing smoke through water. The flavour could then be concentrated using a rotovap, which speeds up evaporation by reducing the pressure, thus lowering the boiling point of water. Although the safety of using liquid smoke as a food flavouring is still being assessed, it does seem as though it would be better for you than actual smoke, since some of the larger insoluble components that are bad for you would drop out as tar.
If you've been at all interested in the science of food, you will have heard of a cooking technique called sous-vide, which involves holding food in vacuum-sealed bags at a lower temperature for long periods of time. This is to ensure that the food cooks evenly, rather than having the outsides done long before the insides come up to temperature. It also means there is no chance of overcooking. Eggs cooked at 63 degrees C for an hour will still be soft with a slow-running yolk, for instance.
The French Culinary Institute blog has some pretty amazing pictures of various foods cooked at different temperatures, such as this one of salmon, which interestingly has two temperatures resulting in goodness. Cook between these temperatures, however, and the fish will squeak when you chew it.
One of the amazing pictures and diagrams from cookingissues.com
The application of science can turn food into a delightful and magical experience. One of the dishes produced in El Bulli, the most famous and widely respected restaurant in the world at the forefront of molecular gastronomy (unfortunately now closed), is their mango caviar.
Mango caviar from El Bulli restaurant, courtesy of www.elbulli.info
To make this, you mix mango juice and sodium alginate and put it into a dropper. Then you squeeze out little pearls into a calcium chloride bath. The calcium ions form a cross linked gel with the alginate ions in what is known as polymer ion exchange, and you end up with a liquid surrounded by a thin jelly coating.
Making mango caviar
Ferran Adrià of El Bulli has also used the same technique to make spherified pea soup, which apparently "explodes in your mouth like ravioli". Cute.
The concept of stretchy icecream wasn't invented by a mad scientist. Salep dondurma has been made in Turkey for 300 years already, and is believed to have originated in the southeastern part of the country. Made from milk, salep (a flour made from the tubers of the wild purple orchids of the Orchis species) and mastic (a resin from the mastic tree, Pistacia lentiscus), the icecream is denser, more elastic and slower to melt than Western icecream. In some places, it is eaten with knife and fork, and it has a "pillowy", marshmallow flavour.
Turkish icecream sellers even make a whole show around the properties of their product:
Here is a recipe for maraş dondurması, a variety which has more salep than usual:
3 Tbsp salep
5 cups milk
1 cup sugar
1 small piece mastic, ground
other flavour ingredients, e.g. pistachio
"Salep" comes from the Arabic for "fox testicle", and can refer to the orchid as well as the flour made from it, which is also used to make a popular Turkish beverage. It contains glucommannans, chain molecules which contribute to the unique texture of Turkish icecream.
Salep increases viscosity
As for mastic, it is a tree resin or sap which has been used in food for over 2000 years. It may even have been found in an ancient shipwreck in the seabed of the Mediterranean. Only in 1998 was this resin identified as Cis-1,4-poly-β-myrcene, and it is one of the original chewing gums. Not too sure whether it is added to dondurma just for its flavour, or whether there is also a functional component. (Professor Kirschenbaum was planning to investigate Kauri gum in New Zealand, as the resin from the Agathis australis tree has also been used as chewing gum in the past.)
A tin containing pieces of mastic, and a box of salep flour
It is now forbidden to export salep, as the purple orchids it comes from is not a sustainable ingredient. Fortunately, it is possible to make stretchy icecream using a similar ingredient instead. The konjac plant, from the tubers of which shiritaki noodles are made, is also high in glucommannans. A number of people have now tried making "konjac dondurma", and it seems to be pretty successful, by all accounts. Professor Kirschenbaum's recipe went something like this:
2g mastic (Chios Gum Mastic, Large Tears)
8g konjac flour
dry ice
1.6L milk
400g sugar
Cool with liquid nitrogen.
Professor Kirchenbaum is a founder of the Experimental Cuisine Collective, along with pastry chef and former dessert restaurant owner Will Goldfarb, and Amy Bentley of the Department of Nutrition, Food Studies and Public Health at New York University. The group was founded in 2007 and now has over 1,800 members. Its mission is to advance delicious cuisine while educating students in the natural sciences.
One inspiring young person Professor Kirschenbaum mentioned is Lauren Hodge, the winner of the inaugural Google Science Fair 2011 in the 13-14 year old age group. She studied the effect of marinades on the amount of carcinogens produced by barbecuing chicken and discovered that having a more acidic marinade component (lemon juice) inhibited the production of a carcinogenic compound, while soy sauce actually increased it.
Suggestions for Chemists and Chefs:
Be creative
curious
collaborative
(com)passionate
Recommended reading:
Harold McGee, On Food and Cooking
Jeff Potter, Cooking for Geeks
Hervé This, Molecular Gastronomy
Myhrvold et al., Modernist Cuisine
