all right hello my name is Melanie
Schneider and I am the club president of
the culinary science club and it is my
privilege to introduce our guest speaker
tonight
our guest speaker has earned a
reputation for applying science and
technology in the kitchen he has earned
degrees of biochemistry and mathematics
and has combined them with his culinary
skills to get him to where he is today
he has experience working in several top
restaurants including the Fat Duck
restaurant in Berkshire England there he
has worked in the experimental kitchen
helping to develop new creative dishes
for their menu
he has written extensively on the
science of food and cooking for the Fat
Duck cookbook and has published
scholarly research in the journal of
Agriculture and Food Chemistry and the
Journal of food science
he is one of the co-authors of the
Modernist Cuisine a beautifully
illustrated six volume set dedicated to
the science of cooking on behalf of the
culinary science club the food science
and human nutrition department and the
Iowa State lectures committee please
join me in welcoming chef Chris Young
thank you very much thank you Wow a lot
of you tonight I certainly never really
expected to be going around giving talks
on the science of cooking as man when he
said I started with degrees in
biochemistry and mathematics at the
University of Washington but at some
point I looked up for my studies and
said you know this really isn't where my
passion lays and I'd always enjoyed
cooking so I figured well I'm gonna get
a job as a cook because well at a
minimum I'll become a much better cook
than I that I am at that point and and
also make some money so I was right
about half of that needless to say I
ended up knocking on a lot of chef's
doors because there wasn't a lot of
interest in hiring a scientist with no
formal training as a cook but I did
eventually find a wonderful kitchen to
apprentice in and had started working in
Seattle's was in the early 2000s and
then around 2003 I heard about a funny
chef with a funny name in England named
Heston Blumenthal who was trying to
apply science to his cooking to make
food more delicious to make it more
interesting make it more fun now sounded
spectacular so I racked up even more
debt and flew myself over to London and
had a meal that was just an epiphany for
me the meal actually began with a dish
called the liquid nitrogen poached green
tea sour now the best way to describe
this dish is the waiter wheels a garrard
on up to your table which is just
fantastic very old-school and they have
this cauldron of boiling liquid nitrogen
boiling at 200 degrees Celsius below
zero about minus 320 Fahrenheit I've got
my math right they take a canister
whipping cream siphon squirt a dollop of
what looks like shaving mousse out into
a spoon spoon not get into that liquid
nitrogen turning it over poaching it for
exactly eight seconds handing it to you
draining it with the from the liquid
nitrogen and asking to eat it in one
bite and you bite into it oh my god is
it delicious you get this puff of
condensation this dragon smoke out your
nose you get the shattering shell in
your mouth you get this rush of coolness
and then the soft luscious very acidic
bright lime juice flavor of the mousse
in the center and it's a great way to
kick off the
because it says this is gonna be
completely different than anything
you've ever had before and the rest of
the meal was every dish after that was
just this fantastic culinary experience
it really showed you what food could be
at the end of the maybe at the end of my
meal that night I knew I absolutely had
to have a job here and I said I would be
happy to come back and work for free for
as long as you will have me turned out
to be a very lucky thing for me working
for Heston was an inspiration I worked
with an incredibly talented culinary
team for over five years many of whom
helped us create new dishes for the
restaurant but really what I took away
from that experience was what a talented
chef could accomplish when enabled by an
appreciation and understanding of the
science that goes on in everybody's
kitchen and the problem is I asked
myself where do you turn to basically
learn these techniques where do you
where are you taught about this I mean
for me I was able to bring my formal
training as a science to bear I was able
to read books I was able to find people
and ask questions but for a young chef
where do you learn to go beyond recipes
where do you learn to go beyond
techniques and to develop new things
create dishes that nobody's ever eaten
before
so around 2007 I had met a like-minded
individual in in the form of my
co-author Nathan Myhrvold who is also a
outstanding scientist is actually a
technologist I was the former chief
technology officer of Microsoft but the
reason we had become friends is we
shared a passion for the science of
cooking in fact specifically we shared a
passion for barbecue we both completely
nuts about american-style barbecue and
so we used to constantly be exchanging
emails of how could we do this better
how can we make better brisket in around
2007 I was getting ready to leave the
fat duck moved back to the States
and I sent him an email simply saying
Nathan I'm gonna be leaving the fat duck
if you'd like to stay in touch use this
other email address to get to keep in
touch going forward 3 minutes later I
get an email back from him the subject
line simply said crazy idea the email
said why don't you come work for me
so Nathan had made quite a bit of money
of Microsoft and he said well why don't
you come to my boat for the weekend in
the Mediterranean and I'll tell you
about this little idea I have
so not really a hard option so I spent
the weekend on the boat with him and we
just sort of sat down and started
outlining the book that we wanted to
exist the book that we really wish we
had had ten years ago when we started
getting into this cooking and that's
really how this began we basically
didn't think anybody else would create
this book so I'll get a couple a little
this out of the way quickly obviously
the book is called Modernist Cuisine the
art and science of cooking Nathan and
myself wrote it along with my co-author
Maxie millet who came with me from the
Fat Duck couple stats you may have heard
it's indeed five volumes plus 350 page
waterproof kitchen manual the pages are
actually washable this is where we put a
lot of the recipes and reference tables
that occur in this book on something
that you could actually take into the
kitchen it's pretty big it's a lot
bigger than we ever expected over 2,400
pages but it's part of the reason it's
so large is it's lavishly illustrated
with photographs because we really
wanted to bring the subject to live we
wanted to share our excitement and one
of the ways to do that was in a very
visual way but although this is a lot of
photographs we shot over a hundred and
seventy thousand photographs over three
years for this book has over 1,500
recipes that were created by our team or
adapted from other chefs that have
inspired us in our journeys around the
world and it's pretty big in every other
way however a million words of text if
you put each of those words and end it's
over six miles I I spent most of the
better part of last fall walking those
six miles over and over during the
proofreading stage but my favorite
statistic of all is this one it's 44
pounds and of that 44 pounds four of it
sink
we had a mock-up made of this before it
was printed by the printer and we picked
up a bow that's really heavy and they
said oh it's gonna get heavier we why
they said the ink said really they said
oh yeah it'll be about four pounds of
ink so sure enough pretty large it's a
hard book to describe but ultimately
it's an encyclopedic treatment of
cooking it covered expect it started is
a book about sous-vide
cooking now I don't know how I'm not
gonna assume everyone's familiar with
this method of cooking but this is done
in most high-end restaurants now I
pulled the wrong presentation up that
should have paused I'll come back to
sous vide cooking we cover traditional
cooking as well everything from pot
roasting to stir-fry we also cover
things like modern ovens these are
controlled vapor ovens pretty common in
commercial kitchens not so much at home
we cover microwaves too we also wanted
to take a look at technology that's
maybe more common in the laboratory but
has profound implications on creativity
in the kitchen and we wanted to explain
it in a very practical way for chefs so
that you can see how this can be used to
really do new things so one example that
you see here
essentially this is a rotor stator
homogenizer this is a blender on
steroids and one of the cool things you
can do with it is you can create
emulsions now mayonnaise is emulsions
butters or emulsion one of the ideas we
had is with civil ice cream essentially
as you know made from an emulsion of
cream and that's just an immuno
butterfat dispersed in water and there's
some proteins and there's some sugars in
it we said well what do we need the
cream for so we had the idea of taking
flavor for oils like pistachio oil and
using this machine to emulsify it into
water with suitable sugars and proteins
to essentially came from create a cream
that's never seen in utter but when you
freeze it it's got this fantastic flavor
of pistachio pistachio is one of these
really delicate flavors that can be very
easily overwhelmed by the milk flavor
and other people have problems with milk
altogether
we're able to create an ice cream just
from pistachio and nothing but pistachio
plus a little bit of sugar you can
extend this idea to all sorts of things
we do a veal cream sauce for a blonde
captive oh that's in fact kosher because
the cream sauce never saw a cow so we
think that's pretty cool we also look at
a lot of the ingredients that can be
intimidating or maybe even unfamiliar
but we wanted to really go back and say
look a lot of these are no stranger than
seaweed some of them that have been used
in Asia for thousands of years but you
can do really tremendous things in the
kitchen in the hands of a talented chef
with these ingredients
but we also wanted to look at familiar
ingredients that we all know we wanted
to look them in ways that have never
before really been considered so eggs
are a fantastic ingredient Hank I was
told somebody from the egg council will
be here tonight we love eggs we have
hundreds of recipes for eggs in this
book because they're just incredibly
versatile and there's things you never
thought to do with them sometimes we
just wanted to show the sheer beauty of
food this is a blueberry those orange
things which are a little hard to see
those are the seeds you've never really
seen them that way before it just looks
so cool up close and this is one of the
techniques we used a lot in the book
it's a normally when you take a
photograph of something this detailed a
little bits and focus and everything
else is out of focus so one of the
techniques we we use is we actually take
hundreds of photos changing the focal
plane a little bit each time and then we
use software to recombine all the
information so that everything's
perfectly in focus it allows you to see
into food in ways that you've never seen
it before and I think sometimes that can
just be inspiring this is a microscopic
photo of potatoes the blue bits are the
cell walls the pink globules are
basically your gooey water balloon like
structures of starch granules now the
secret to mashed potato it turns out is
getting those blue parts broken apart
without rupturing the gooey water
balloons so we take a look at basically
the science of how do you cook the
perfect mashed potato to keep it silky
and smooth or light and fluffy but
without making it sort of gluey and
stringy and it all comes down to
basically managing those starch granules
this is another really cool photo I love
this is actually one millimeter of steak
now what a lot of people assume is this
white part that's how they think that's
fat it's not it's not fat at all that's
actually the meat it turns in fact if
you were standing quite far away from it
it would look like gray overcooked meat
but up close it's whiter than white if
you take an egg white and you start with
it raw it's translucent but when you
cook it it goes opaque and white because
it coagulates the proteins and that
protein is now scatter like meat does
the same thing because when you cook
meat you're causing it to gel you may
not think of meat as a gel but in fact
that's what it is
you have the crust you have the flavor
creation zone then you have the point
where the proteins are coagulating the
meat starting to overcook the chasms
that are being created is actually the
water that's flashing the steam pushing
itself apart is that water expands into
steam and it's actually ripping apart
the surface of the steak by boiling it
essentially from the inside out so this
is gonna go pretty quickly but we we
really wanted to show how to apply this
understanding in a practical way with
lots of step-by-step photos if you want
to learn traditional French cooking if
you want to learn Japanese techniques
there are tons of books this thick that
will show you how to trust a Jake in or
bone out a duck like a Frenchman but
there's really no book that shows how to
do some of the techniques that leading
restaurants around the world have been
doing the last 10 years and that was
really one of our early inspirations is
we sort of felt one of our contributions
to the culinary community would be to
aggregate these techniques that you
could spend a lifetime searching out
otherwise put them in one place and
document them in a very clear fashion to
see how to do it so I'll just flip
through some of our pages for a moment
so make your head spin a little bit
there's literally hundreds of them but
we wanted to explain why the techniques
work we really wanted to look at the
physics the chemistry of what was going
on but we wanted to do it in a way that
was practical and useful for chefs or
people who are just enthusiastic about
cooking so a few more pages just to give
you a sense of how we try to tell the
science story in a very visually
compelling way and I'll come back to
some of these and talk about them a
little later
okay
so one of the things that we yeah no
don't go running for the exit I'm really
not gonna stand up here and try to
explain for he a seat equation in the
nitty-gritty of partial differential
equations but I am gonna explain why we
spend a whole chapter talking about heat
because heat is the ingredient that we
all use as cooks in this equation while
the specifics may not be important to
chefs the implications are tremendously
important because it explains how long
will something take to cook how evenly
is it gonna cook why is one technique of
cooking different than another very
often it comes down to subtle
differences in the heat transfer and the
knock-on effects that that has so to
take a specific example that I think
most people can appreciate is grilling
this is one of our cutaway photographs
and one of the ways we try to bring
people into the process of what's going
on when you cook food it's to literally
cut things in half so that you can see
inside it because there's an awful lot
going on with something that's a
seemingly simple as grilling each of
these points sort of drawing your
attention to the various things going on
just to choose one I'll talk about where
that grilled flavor comes from that sets
grilling apart from say pan roasting it
turns out it's the drippings that create
the flavor of grilled food so what
you've got here is a nice hot coal and
these are drippings from a hamburger and
the oil basically it starts to evaporate
boil off it's reaching its smoking point
and then the vapors ignite you're
basically forging aroma compounds in now
in those flames a lot of those aroma
compounds are carried up by the rising
air currents and redeposit on the food
and that adds the characteristic flavor
that makes grilled foods so delicious
but of course the yellow part of the
flame that's soot that soot glowing
incandescent ly hot like a filament and
a light bulb and if you get your food
too near to that you have soda on your
food and it's pretty accurate and
unpleasant so the trick is getting the
food at just the right height so that
you don't get it soot covered but you do
get those grilled flavors on it so the
question is what's the right height
well grilling is actually really kind of
counterintuitive because it's using
radiant heat it's the radiant heat of
the glowing coals most things the
further you get away from them the
cooler it's going to get grilling not so
it's like a light bulb if I'm
this close to a light bulb and then I
step back the light bulbs about the same
brightness girls work the same way
the food is looking at the light coming
from the coals up close it's seeing a
lot of light and it's very hot you raise
it above those flames the temperature
the heat it's basically experiencing it
hasn't changed you have to get really
far away before the intensity of that
grilled heat starts to fall so the idea
of raising or lowering your grill to
control the temperature it's cooking it
doesn't really work until you get
several multiples of the grills diameter
away from the coals and that's when you
start getting into rotisserie or
Argentine asado so this basically shows
how the intensity of the radiant heat
falls off with distance and some people
say who cares I say why not water is
another thing that we felt was really
important to talk about and sort of
share our particular abused I mean at
the end of the day you can think of food
as water with a bunch of impurities
carrots have as much water in them as
milk does so one of the miracles of
nature that it doesn't seem that it's
that wet it's so structured but in fact
it's a very wet thing lettuce my friend
calls lettuce a crunchy water bottle
it's probably the most expensive way to
ship water around the planet but
understanding water is the difference
between great sautes and mediocre ones
because the secret of a great saute is
getting the water to flash the steam
fast enough so that it doesn't
accumulate in the pan and end up stewing
your vegetables because you get very
different flavor reactions depending on
those situations so if your burners
underpowered you're gonna get stewed
vegetables not great sauteed I have a
friend actually from Ames Iowa who's
making fun of me today for for being
here but he has an unnatural fetish for
dry fried green beans and he was he he
bought a new house recently and said
Chris I have this very fancy German
stove and I love to make dry fried green
beans but how come I can't make them as
well as they do with that Chinese
restaurant down the street
I said well German stove sure is fancy
but a typical wok burner looks something
like this it's about 250,000 BTU hours
of heat coming out of there it sounds
like a jet engine on an
your burner your home stove your fancy
one it has maybe one tenth that amount
of power if you're lucky more common
home burner has maybe one twentieth you
can't put enough heat into the pan fast
enough to flash that water to steam and
so you end up stewing the vegetables
rather than getting a blistered sauteed
texture and flavor so the much better
solution is to use a different technique
deep frying vegetables can be fantastic
even as good as dry fried and that's
doable at home getting water into steam
also doing it fast enough is why things
like this work
I just love that it's cool it's really
pretty fascinating what's going up let's
go back
see technology
there we go it's pretty interesting what
you have going on here you have a tiny
little bit of water left in that corn
kernel and the oil is bringing so much
heat into the surface that that water
just beneath the seed coat starts
flashing in the steam now water is
pretty interesting stuff when you turn
it into steam it expands in volume by
almost a factor of 1,700 so that steam
is trying to escape the first place it
does is a little weak spot at the bottom
of the corn kernel so it turns into a
steam rocket liftoff but as he keeps
diffusing in from the surface towards
the core more and more water's being
flashed to steam and at some point that
seed coat doesn't have the strength to
hold it so poof it starts to expand out
it's actually creating a foam in the
same way baking bread Rises in your oven
from water being converted into steam
but this is just happening much faster
now the reason popcorn ends up crunchy
is as that foam expands in expanding gas
cools so that expanding gas cools and
causes the foam to become rigid and hard
as it cools
that's why Popkin works now oh okay yeah
popcorn up not that interesting but it
turns out understanding those principles
can have some profound implications on
how to make crisper skin for example in
your porkchop and I'll come back to that
this by the way is the camera we use to
shoot those movies it's called a phantom
v12 it's about five of these in the
country and it will shoot
high-definition video in about 6,800
frames a second so for gratuitous fun
and because I can't put it in the book
I'll show some movies
this is classic bartender technique of
basically incinerating the peel oils
again for dinos characteristic burnt
orange aromas now when you have a camera
like this at some point somebody's gonna
go hey why don't we get a gun
so I think we're the only cookbook with
a recipe for ballistics gelatin in it
it's great the way it just keeps going
it makes me really not want to get shot
so seeing into the cooking process
understanding what's going on with heat
what's going on with water what's going
on with the meat and the flavor
creations personally I think it can be
interesting for its own sake it gives
you a view into the way the world works
the kitchen is the laboratory we all
have it's a place for fun and creativity
and I think that's what's interesting
about this but I think also exploring
the hows and whys of cooking can become
an inspiration this cutaway of a
traditional pork pot roast inspired this
dish by our team now this probably looks
like a pork chop cooked by a caveman but
the surprise is absolutely everything in
that photo is edible and I'm biased but
I think it's delicious too the ash
actually tastes like gingerbread spice
the somebody was asking me about charred
leek tonight those leeks if you push on
them you have a molten charge Center
that's just fantastic the coals a little
bit of kitchen chemistry here we take a
prune we braise it in cognac then we
take the braising juices from the pork
roast we add a non sweet sugar ice a
mold and we boil it into a syrup and
then we just do simple little acid-base
chemistry we mix some baking powder or
baking soda and vinegar in you get a
nice violent foaming reaction we quickly
coat the confit prunes in that boiling
syrup and then we put it into a vacuum
chamber raise it up to about 90 thousand
feet high and those bubbles keep
expanding as you reduce the pressure on
them and as they do they cool that foam
down it hardens into an edible pumice
that tastes like braised basically in
the center you have a chewy molten prune
and they have this crisp shattering
delicious pork flavor around it I think
it's pretty fun but even if that's not
your cup of tea the same ideas can be
used for making a better pork chop I
have kind of a love for pork chops and
really love for crispy skin so we went
way overboard on the book on skin but
essentially this is a technique we
developed were we
take our best end of pork loin we take
this skin off and we we pressure cook it
to render or basically gelatinize the
collagen in the skin and then we dry it
now this bar pretty much how you make
pork rinds we then grind it and sift it
into the right granule size so that it's
gonna stick to the pork loin the best
and eventually we're gonna deep-fry that
pork chop so that that skin puffs up and
you get this incredibly crisp crackling
crust on this really luscious piece of
meat but part of the trick we use to
prevent the meat from overcooking is we
cook the meat separately at the
temperature we like which is about 140
Fahrenheit for pork chop then we just
before coating it with the dried skin
and knowing that we're gonna deep-fry it
we plunge it into liquid nitrogen for
about 20 seconds first the idea is
liquid nitrogen is about 200 degrees
below zero your deep frying oil is about
200 degrees above zero we freeze the
same amount of flesh that we would
otherwise overcook when we deep-fry it
so I think liquid nitrogen is a great
thing to have you around your house but
even if you don't you can usually get
dry ice and you can do the same thing
with a chicken breast with dry ice it's
actually quite easy just before I sear
it I'll put it down on a block of dry
ice for a couple minutes to freeze a
thin layer of flesh underneath it that
frozen layer acts as an insulator and
prevents the flesh from overcooking so
we have lots of recipes throughout the
book where we try to put this into an
actual working way obviously we made
them all because we think they're
delicious but throughout these recipes
we actually tried to put in a lot of
tips in margin notes and techniques on
how you could adapt this even if you're
not going to do this elaborate 30 hour
recipe that takes a team of six people
to do you know maybe you can just take
this one part of the recipe and make a
better roast chicken or maybe you can
read this margin note and it tells you
where to find the best cut of a ribeye
so we tried to put a lot of rewards in
for people to actually take the time to
read the recipes even if you don't make
them so I'm going to talk about one of
my recipe one of the recipes that
changed my life in fact we call this the
omelet that will change your life yeah
one of the hardships of making the book
is we had to sit around eating these
things for years it was
was awful and as I said we wanted to do
a lot of things with eggs so we created
an omelet
that has this unbelievably soft texture
you can see how we roll it up like a
crepe and we basically make a scrambled
egg filling that goes into it that we do
out of a whipping cream siphon the
overall experience is just delicious now
we said hey let's go a step too far and
make it a striped omelet so we got this
basically pastry comb and we make a
black truffle puree with egg yolk in it
we comb it out then we cook it and that
sets the stripes and then you come back
and you pour the the omelet mixture over
it cook it again and you create these
big sheets that you can make in advance
that have this fantastic texture okay so
maybe you don't want to do that but
here's the one tip I will tell you that
I think will change your life the secret
to a great three egg omelet is throw
away one of the whites it turns out just
that one act of getting rid of one of
the whites makes the omelet so much more
tender so much more rich and delicious
that you kind of wonder why nobody
thought to do it before and this kind of
goes into something that we really
wanted to explain throughout the book is
sure we can have these recipes we can
have step by step techniques but how do
you go beyond that how do you do things
that really haven't been done before so
we tried to create a lot of tables like
this now I know you can't read this but
this is our basically our omelet table
we literally made hundreds and hundreds
I think about five hundred and forty
variations on egg yolk whole eggs how
much they were blended with water and
what the cooking temperature was and
then we sat there eating them to try to
figure out what's that texture like
because it turns out at different
temperatures I can get the same texture
with different blends of egg yolks and
egg whites so if I want it richer but I
want it softer I need to lower the
temperature because otherwise my gelled
eggs are gonna be too strong so you
literally can come over to the table and
go oh I want a lot of egg yolks so I
need to lower my cooking cooking
temperature down to 70 Celsius to get
that texture that I really want
conversely you might want something
that's a firmer frittata like texture
well that's in the table too so we tried
to create a lot of these tables that
condense literally hundreds of recipes
and a fairly simple straight
Ford tables that tell you how to make
just about any texture you want a little
more avant-garde perhaps is hot fruit
and but hot fruit or vegetable gels
might never thought you wanted to make a
hot green apple gel but if you do we
tell you how to do it but more
importantly it's choose your texture do
you want it firm and brittle you want it
soft and elastic somewhere in between
there's the different gelling agents
that will tell you how to achieve that
texture but it turns out the right
proportions depend on the pH of the
fruit or vegetable so over here is a
table of typical PHS for about 80 fruits
and vegetables so it's sort of again
choose your own ending but then we have
step by chefs showing how to use these
tables putting them into action hot
green apple gel is made a little bit
different than a hot banana gel or a hot
orange gel so these are all slight
variations but give you a sense of how
you can use these tables to do things
that haven't been done before very often
they're merely really meant to be
starting points for your own creativity
as I said the book originally started
out as a book about sous-vide we thought
oh maybe it'll be 300 pages and we
thought we'd really explain how to do
sous-vide both safely and how to do it
well because there wasn't a lot of good
information out there on this technique
now for those of you who aren't familiar
with sous-vide cooking this is
essentially where you're cooking the
food to the exact temperature you want
to eat it at so if I want my chicken I
cook it to 140 there's no reason to put
in an oven at 350 degrees better give me
crispy skin but by the time the core
temperature reaches 140 a whole lot of
that chicken is overcooked it's sort of
a compromise you're using high heat to
get crisp skin you end up overcooking a
bunch of the flesh and your core
temperature is kind of the texture you
want we say why not cook the whole
chicken at 140 and then if you want
crispy skin really quickly deep-fry it
or use a blowtorch or quickly sear it on
a grill afterwards in other words split
the cooking process into two stages cook
it at the temperature you want it at
then sear it or blanch it afterwards to
get the surface texture you want don't
compromise with this hotter than
necessary cooking the problem is this is
becomes kind of unintuitive most people
aren't used to thinking about what
but you're do I want my short rib cook
to well it kind of depends do you want
your short rib to have a steak like firm
New York strip texture
well 54 degrees for 48 hours give you
that in spades maybe you don't have that
much time well if you're willing to have
a flaky air texture you can use 80
Celsius for about eight hours and then
I'll give you a flaky texture but those
aren't the only choices of course so we
created tables with best bet times and
temperatures for different textures for
different cuts of meat again this was
like an incredibly labor-intensive thing
to do we had to go through cooking
dozens and dozens of cuts to try to sort
of find out what combination of time and
temperature we're getting to give the
texture we wanted but hopefully these
tables are starting points for some of
the chef's and our audience for example
of I want this pork chop medium-rare
what temperature is the best one to use
or I want a flaky texture for my
carnitas how to do that or you know what
I don't have 48 hours how can I use a
pressure cooker to get the same result
in 20 minutes all of that's encapsulated
in these best bet tables so that's how
we started out would be about sous-vide
maybe we'll add a few other recipes in
and then we kind of got carried away
as I said Nathan they are kind of
barbecue nuts so we said well you know
we're gonna sell a lot of these books in
Europe and like we both kind of got
tired of hearing from some of our
European chef friends how Italy and
France they have these great traditions
of these micro regional cuisines where
the cuisine of one town is different
than another you don't have anything
like that in America wrong
we have barbecue barbecue in Lexington
is completely different than the
barbecue you're gonna find in the
coastal lands of North Carolina and
plenty of people from Texas would tell
you that's not even barbecue the
barbecue you find in Alabama is
different than South Carolina so we
really wanted to create this map to show
the various micro regional aspects of
American barbecue and then we kind of
kept going we ended up creating 12
different examples of regional sauces
was sort of a no-holds-barred approach
to making the best version we could and
then we created about 30 barbecue
recipes and a couple pastrami's and then
oh well we should do a cornbread recipe
we should do coleslaw recipes so we got
completely carried away and we
ended up with an entire chapter on
barbecue so far so good
and then one of our cooks angina who's
from India she comes to uh she comes to
me one day goes um you know curries are
kind of like barbecue and I'm like no
angina no no we've got to get the book
done we cannot do this too much time we
don't need to do it see you can see what
a good manager I'm asked but this
actually goes to the point a lot of
people think this type of cooking is
this weird revolution that just started
but I would argue all cooking is just a
series of revolutions and we're just
having one revolution right now India is
nothing but a stream of revolutions what
was going curry like before the
Portuguese showed up with chilies
what about Mogo curry before the moguls
or let alone the British before the
British brought dairy into the curries
what was an Indian curry like before
there were tomatoes come to think of it
what was Italian cuisine like before
there were tomatoes and so this is
really the point that cuisine is
something that humans are constantly
reinventing we're always looking for new
ingredients we're always looking for new
flavors and new ways to do things to me
I think new ingredients are wonderful
but I also think bringing science and
technology to the kitchen can also be an
inspiration to do new things and create
new flavors that delight our senses and
that's what's very exciting about this
kind of cuisine to me needless to say
creating this book was a tremendous
amount of work so it wouldn't have been
possible without my co-author Nathan
Nathan obviously financed this but he
was also crazy enough to say hey a book
like this really should exist and who
else would do this now not a lot of
people know Nathan as a chef and very
few people know he's a passionate foodie
he's usually better known for the other
things he's done in life might be
familiar with one of his other products
of course he and I couldn't do this
without a fantastic team this is our
head chef max who came with me from the
Fat Duck max made a lot of message to
get these beautiful photos you've seen
in fact right here that's how we got
this photo it turns out there's a reason
they don't sell half a wok
it involves a lot of fire and a lot of
things burning up now the person who
generally would egg us on and say hey
why don't we cut a walk in half was this
gentleman Ryan Smith
Ryan originally was hired to be our
photo editor and when we started
shooting 170,000 photos Ryan was the
person who took almost every photo you
see in this book and hopefully if you
like it the credit goes here but of
course there was a big team behind even
us actually before I'll mention a few
other team members people ask how do we
get those cutaways well we have a
kitchen but we also have a machine shop
at our invention company and we really
did cut the stuff in half everyone
assumes it's all photoshop trickery but
no this is a wire EDM where we're using
electric current basically a stupid
amount of electric current to arc and
erode through the metal getting a high
precision cut of half a Dutch oven
Ted Ellis here whose photos you hand you
just saw formerly was a instrument maker
for the CERN nuclear particle detector
he's now the world's foremost expert in
cutting kitchenware in half but I think
this did serve a purpose of hoping
hopefully really getting chefs into the
cooking process of what's actually going
on and getting them excited and reading
and thinking about things they might not
otherwise have given a second look the
recipes everything else was due to our
very large culinary team I have we have
six full-time chefs who for the last
five years have done nothing but
basically cook for us and develop
recipes it's been hardship I know but a
lot of fun there is also a large team
behind actually producing the book we
had at the high-water mark over 36
people working full-time on this book
including editors art directors copy
editors research assistants and on and
on and on it turns out there's a reason
to book like this hasn't been created
before it is a tremendous amount of work
so hopefully people have some questions
so this is kind of a thank you for for
listening to me hopefully you find this
interesting
before I go one last thing just for a
little bit of fun
fastest way to scramble omelette an egg
thank you
and questions will be here at the center
aisle anybody has a question sure make
it the Inquisition
fascinating I've done a little food
photography as well as many people in
this room and Wow
that's nothing like what we've done so
the obvious question is so now that
you've done this and you had this whole
team assembled what happens to the team
what happens to the chefs what happens
what are they gonna go do now you know
we don't entirely know I wish we had a
better answer in that right now
everyone's been really busy doing
dinners around the country promoting the
book but you're absolutely right we've
put together a great team and it would
be a shame to lose them so Nathan and
the rest of us are starting to discuss
what's next it's conceivable there might
be a few more volumes it's hard to
believe we left anything out but the
book doesn't cover pastry baking
confectionary there's a whole bunch of
other stuff that ended up on the cutting
room floor so so there is more to do oh
I worked for a chef named William
bilikiss at a restaurant called Mistral
William was a protege of David Boulais
and it was a fantastic small kitchen a
great place to work yeah hi I'm a
graduate from the CIA and thinking about
starting a going to school here for good
science wondering if you have any
recommendations starting out that's I'm
not sure I'm the best person to be
giving career advice it's a little bit
of serendipity that led my path but I
certainly think there's a lot to be
gained by understanding what's going on
in HoN and food and I think the science
can be fascinating what I would say is
look broadly take a lot of different
classes and different subjects and
gravitate towards whatever is gonna
interest you for me I love meat that
might not be your thing but search
around I'm curious about the kinds of
food that you worked with it seems that
another important strain of American
cooking is kind of shopping to find the
perfect egg or the perfect piece of pork
did did you did you do anything like
that
seek out particular kinds of eggs or
pigs that had been fed particular diet
absolutely in fact we kind of went
overboard in a lot of ways but maybe not
the way most people think I'm certainly
not going to defend bad ingredients I'm
a huge fan of the best quality
ingredients you can get and so much the
better if it's local sustainable and in
many of the other issues my personal
view is really understanding what it
takes to produce a great ingredient is
paramount so that you can work with the
producers to help everyone up their game
so for example in the meat section there
was a you know there's a big section on
the importance of slaughter what happens
at the farm these are things that are so
often done wrong and as chefs if
slaughter screwed up the animals treated
inhumanely there's nothing we can do as
chefs to salvage that ingredient it's
going to be inferior and mediocre so the
problem is as a chef we want the best
ingredient but what do we ask our
supplier to do what do we demand for
them to do to raise the quality of
ingredients for all of us and so I
believe telling people what things
matter what things they should be
working with their suppliers to try to
achieve I think that's important it's
something we spend a lot of time on in
the book both in terms of plant foods
but also in terms of animals and
seafoods one of my favorite things I've
seen come out of molecular gastronomy is
reverse spherification yeah where did
that come from the food business in 1948
I believe I know it yeah it turns out
that believe the original patent was
filed in England I think it was 1948 it
might have been 1951 believe it or not I
don't have everything memorized it was
basically a way of making among other
things it was the way of making
artificial pimentos to put into olives
it was the way of making pie cherries
that wouldn't leak juice all over a
blueberries for muffins so it was used
in a lot of different ways it's a common
property of many gelling agents that
they're very sensitive to salt ions and
you can get them do these tricks people
like Ferran rediscovered this with the
help of food scientists in the late 90s
and basically used it to really
delicious effect to create these
wonderful surprising tree so does it
solidify all the way through or
still it depends on how you do it if you
do reverse spherification it will not
solidify all the way through directs
purification will eventually although
there's some ways to hold it but that's
all covered in the book Oh
so this is basically turns out you can
take certain gels and to get them
they'll basically be gooey liquids and
before and they won't gel until you
introduce a salt ion usually calcium or
could be magnesium at most often calcium
and so what food manufacturers realities
hey if we want cherries that are all the
same size we want cherries that don't
leak juices when we bake pie so why
don't we take cherry juice add this
seaweed derived gelling agent and then
we'll just add drops of it into this
salt water bath and they'll solidifying
into Spears and that worked great but
then you could argue well the cherry
juice wasn't very delicious and there
was shelf life issues and so it was you
know it was an inferior low grade
product but it served solve certain
technical problems that same technology
that same understanding put in the hand
of a talented chef like Ferran adrià and
Spain he created these liquid olives
that looked just like in all of you pop
in your mouth and it would just be a
burst of intense olive juice and it was
fantastic and we do fund the at tricks
like that that we're surprising and
whimsical and so it's a point that the
technology isn't inherently evil it's
not necessarily an inferior food product
it's just the constraints that Ferran is
working with are not the same as a food
manufacturer just two quick questions
chef do we need bigger kitchens now with
all the new equipment that's coming in
and is that what the next few books are
gonna be about no no I'll point out that
the the kitchen at the Fat Duck was we
joking referred to as Bali in a broom
closet it had about six and a half foot
ceilings it was my minuscule we cover
every kind of gadget and technology you
could want in this book I don't know of
any kitchen on the planet that has all
of these toys nor do I think every
kitchen on the planet should on the
other hand I'd make the argument as a
chef I think most chefs are inherently
curious people and so I think even if
you don't have a spray dryer and you're
not gonna go buy a freeze dryer I think
it's kind of interesting to know how
it's made and and you can make the
decisions of what things are appropriate
for your kitchen or
propria for your style of cooking and
what things you go hey that's
interesting but it's not for me so we
cover everything but I don't think you
need a bigger kitchen
I just want to revisit about that
chicken breast hmm
we've got a server at 140 so I'm told in
this country you can't legally yeah yeah
how do I get that then by quickly
deep-frying that and Chris me enough if
it's have I already is it cold
and I've submitted it earlier and it's
cold no so the way you keep it out so
for the the chicken breast so what we
would do is we would cook it to 140
Fahrenheit the USDA are the basically
the food laws require that you hold it
there for 12.1 minutes to achieve
pasteurization otherwise you've got to
put that little note on your menu about
raw undercooked foods might kill you
anyway so you cook it to that
temperature sous-vide then I would take
it out and to crisp the skin
I would essentially put it on dry ice
for about three minutes seems a little
crazy because you're freezing it but
you're only freezing the skin and the
bit beneath it and then I'd go straight
down on a plancha or a griddle yeah that
will follow the skin very quickly and
fry it and crisp it up and it will
eventually melt that ice layer but until
it melts that ice layer the heat of the
plancha isn't going to go any further
into the chicken breast so it can't
overcook it so he's holding the chicken
breast that damaged it that one did you
hold it at that temperature so if you
had a the way we would do it is I use a
sieve app oven and I hold it at 140 turn
hight for service or I have them in a
sous-vide bag and I pull them to work
when the order comes on thank you very
much welcome anything else okay thank
you
Thanks coming I'd like to remind you
that there's a book signing and a
reception afterwards so will everyone
join me in thanking our speaker one more
time
