Lamb, Mastic, Date, Rosemary Fragrance

Not wanting to let forward progress in the cookbook fall aside, I worked on this dish at the same time I was making bubblegum soup, melting skittles, and baking hay. It was relatively straightforward to cook, but the presentation is especially awesomesauce.

At Alinea, several courses before this dish is presented, a waitstaff member places an oddly-designed ‘bud vase’ on the table near each guest; the bud vase houses a bright, fresh sprig of rosemary that leans bouncily sideways. As the menu nears this course, silverware is removed and replaced with chopsticks, and we see the bud vase double as a chopstick rest.


The diner is then presented with a ‘brick’ suspended in a fine wire frame. Atop the brick are three small sizzling bits of meat topped with various garnishes, and a diner can feel heat emanating from the brick. The rosemary sprig is removed from the bud vase and inserted into a small hole at one end of the brick. Almost immediately, the air is thick with the scent of rosemary, the volatile oils being released by the heat of the brick.


The three small bites of meat sizzling away are lamb. One is topped with mastic cream and a fresh small chervil tip. A second is topped with date compote and some young oregano leaves. The third bit is topped with a finely-minced cap of red wine-braised cabbage.



I don’t have a ton of “in progress” photos for this dish, largely because I was doing too many things at once. Probably the most interesting bit for me was securing some lamb; the last time I worked with lamb I was frustrated with my experience ordering it at a butcher counter because I didn’t really know what I was asking for. While I still have a lot to learn, my experience taking a butchery class has given me more confidence in knowing what to ask for and how to identify what’s being sold to me. At Berkeley Bowl, I asked the butcher if they had lamb loin. She gestured at some sliced lamb chops they had on display, and I shook my head and asked if they had a whole loin. She called over a manager, who nodded at me and went to the back. He returned a few moments later with a massive slab of meat. I asked if it was frozen and he shook his head no. I asked him to unwrap it so I could see it and weigh it; he asked if I wanted just the loin (the cut still had the two side flaps attached, which I knew wouldn’t serve me at all and would just add extra weight/cost to the purchase), and I said yes. So he trimmed it down, weighed it, and looked at me when the scale read out $83 for the slab. (At this point Sarah, exasperated by my insistence on buying this and prone to anxiety when she goes shopping with me because of this exact experience, shook her head and sighed “I’ll be over by the beer” as she walked away in frustration). I looked at the butcher and mulled it over, but before too long had passed he punched some more buttons and the price dropped by $10. “Ok, I’ll take that” I said.

I get why Sarah dislikes this, and it’s amusing to me that I, inversely, really enjoy it. There’s a rush for me that’s fueled by the excitement of knowing that I know something I didn’t know before. Being able to buy exactly what cut I want (and to know what I’m doing with it when I get home) is, to me, a mark of what I’ve learned. That’s quite satisfying.

At my butchery class, we cut the loin (which contains several long muscles running alongside the spine…if someone gives you a backrub up and down your back, the long vertical muscles they’re rubbing are these same muscles) into english chops, which involved cross-cutting the loin into tidy individual portions. For this dish, I wanted the loin intact, so I cut it away from the spine in one long cut. This yielded two sirloin strips and two tenderloin strips; I vacuum-sealed and froze the tenders and one of the sirloins, leaving me one remaining sirloin to cook sous vide at 57C for about a half-hour, packed in olive oil.

For service, the loin was cut into 3/4″ cubes, then seared on one side in a bit of oil in a hot pan. The cubes were garnished before being placed on the brick (Alinea originally used terra cotta bricks, but Martin at Crucial Detail did a run of cast-iron ones, an extra of which he sold me a while back and which I’ve been looking forward to using on this dish ever since). The brick itself is heated to 500F in an oven before service.

The pairings of the garnishes with the lamb were tasty for the most part; Sarah and I agreed we found the mastic pairing to be the least-amazing of the bunch. Mastic has a pretty distinctive taste, and it with the lamb didn’t seem to yield something more than the sum of its parts. The date and oregano combination was our favorite; the sweetness and pepperiness of the date compote and the warm depth of the oregano was delicious. The texture of the lamb bits themselves was also nice, going from a crisped ‘bottom’ to the medium-rare ‘top’, and the deep, fresh scent of rosemary vapor hanging in the air made both of us want to sniff deeply as we ate each bite.

The one thing I seem to consistently be underwhelmed by is the flavor of the meat itself. I think I must be doing something wrong, because on almost every Alinea dish so far, sous vide meat has been surprisingly less interesting than I’d imagine. There’s not a ton of flavor other than mild ‘meat flavor’, which itself never strikes me as delicious as, say, a great grilled steak that’s been seasoned and left to marinate for a while. Maybe I’m doing something wrong in how I finish it? The sous vide step I’ve got down pretty well (cook to medium-rare), then I chill the meat, cut it, and store it in the fridge under a damp napkin until I’m ready to finish and plate it. I take it out of the fridge and sear it usually, but the meat usually never gets super-warmed-through before the searing is complete, so the final product is sort of “lukewarm” in temperature, and blase in flavor. What could I do to improve this?



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Hay, Coffee, Cardamom, Oak

Sarah shot this video of my time at home with my family in Kentucky over the Christmas holidays. I can’t watch it and not feel acutely homesick and a little teary; I lucked into a pretty great home and family. The cooking we’re doing is the Black Truffle Explosion, my siblings’ favorite dish when we ate at Alinea together last year (for Christmas I bought all the ingredients and equipment needed to recreate the dish, and we all cooked it together over the course of an afternoon). I share it because it’s very personal to me, as is this dish.

The entire time I was working on my Bubblegum Tube servicepieces, I was trying to come up with ideas for other things I could serve in them. I came across a photo someone had taken of a more-recent course at Alinea involving the tube filled with dragonfruit and finger lime; I didn’t scrutinize it too closely and haven’t tried to find other reference for what the restaurant’s doing with them because I wanted to be creative on my own.

One of the gifts I was given over Christmas was the Noma cookbook. I’ve heard only the slightest bit about this restaurant–only that it was named Best in the World a few years back, and that the chef has worked at elBulli and The French Laundry before starting it. The book is pretty, if a little awkward to use practically. There are sections of large full-page photographs presented in groups of 20 or so, with brief descriptions on a single page dividing the groups, and all the recipes are grouped at the end of the book…so there’s a ton of flipping involved in any effort to browse it. It’s also a near-impossible book, largely because of its reliance on foraged ingredients local to Copenhagen.

This is what I found most intoxicating about it though. Standing peer to my experience with both Alinea and the Alinea cookbook is a restaurant in (and cookbook from) Arrowtown, New Zealand called Saffron. The chef talks about foraging for snowberries in the winter with his dog before coming to work in the morning, or using otherwise hyperlocal ingredients characteristic not only of New Zealand but specifically the Otago region in which the restaurant is located. I find both the idea and execution poetic and beautiful and Noma operates similarly, but with an extremely high-end pedigree to support it.

I was flipping through the book on a winter morning in Kentucky at my parents’ house, which sits atop a hill on our cattle farm. One of the dishes that caught my eye and inspired me was called simply “Lingonberries and Hay Cream”.  I’d just come in from helping Dad feed the cattle, a process involving a lot of heavy clothes and tall Muck boots because of the frigid winter cold. There’s frost on the ground around our barnyard, but the area where the cows eat is muddier and sloppier. Feeding them involves moving a few rolls of hay around to feeding rings. They hay is frost-covered as well, and it smells strongly sweet and grassy; I always liked the scent. The feeding is a cold experience, and when we get back up to our house, the first thing we do is brew some coffee. My mom is usually just waking up; she’s a tea-drinker, and likes chai in the mornings. Dad starts a fire in our fireplace with oak logs that grow in the woods behind our house.

It’s a very specific experience for me, and seeing Noma articulate a small part of it (the hay cream) made me realize how rich the experience was for exploration. I particularly loved the idea of capturing a very personal experience and expressing it in this ‘medium’.

I started by making my own Hay Cream. First I needed some hay. I poked around the bay area a bit (staying local and all), but most of what I found was straw.  Straw is different from hay in that the nutritious tips of the grass have been removed; straw is usually used for bedding rather than food. I was torn a little between the desire to be hyperlocal and the desire to be hyperpersonal. In the end I called mom and asked her if she could mail me a box of hay from our farm. She did without batting an eye; she’s getting used to odd requests from me these days. A few days later, a box smelling strongly and sweetly of chilled winter hay showed up at my door. I aired it out in some paper bags for a few days to remove the moisture.

The noma book mentions baking hay at 325F for an hour; this smelled amazing. Our apartment smelled warm and summery and exactly the way the loft of our barn smells in late July. The recipe then directs me to vacuum-seal the hay for a few hours with some cream to infuse. I tried this, but the ratio of cream to hay was small enough that the hay mostly absorbed the cream; ‘straining’ the hay afterwards yielded no liquid, but the cream-soaked hay smelled amazing. I tried a second time, this time baking the hay until it was fragrant, then soaking it in 1000g of milk mixed with 200g of cream in a large plastic container left to steep over night in the fridge.

This second attempt worked beautifully; the liquid was a lovely beige cream color the next day. I strained it, then boiled it gently with agar to set it into a gel, then sheared it in a blender into what the Alinea cookbook habitually refers to as “pudding” (though I’ve seen other resources refer to this as a “fluid gel”). The result was a sweet, thick cream that tasted beautifully like fresh hay to me. I let Sarah try some, and she said it tasted delicious but wouldn’t have recognized it as hay. This is because she’s a city slicker, always talkin’ real fast and always in a big hurry and whatnot.

I wanted to pair the hay with coffee for my dad and chai tea for my mom. After my experiments making bubblegum bubbles, cooking tapioca pearls in coffee and a tea made of cardamom and clove was straightforward.

The last ingredient I wanted to try to harness was ‘a fireplace’. For Christmas, one of my sisters gave me a small 1L charred white oak barrel. It’s meant to be used to age, well, anything; hot sauce, alcohol, syrup, wine…anything that might benefit from oaky flavor form the inside of a charred white oak barrel. After curing the barrel, I filled it with water and let it age to see if I could get ‘charred oak-flavored water’, which I’d use to make a gel.


I knew the barrel aging would give nice oak flavor, but I also wanted a smoky note in my ‘firewood’. After baking several batches of hay, I tried another batch at a higher temperature for longer; I brought the hay as close to its combustion point as I could without it actually smoking overtly or bursting into flames. After a few hours of this, I spun it through a food processor and sifted the powder into a small storage jar: smoked hay ash. I wanted to mix this with the oak water to see if it reminded me of our fireplace at home.

After creating the oak and ash mixture, I set it with agar to make caps for my tube. I used agar because of its high melting point; I had this idea to try to get a thermal differential going in the tube. I wanted the hay cream to be very chilled, but the cardamom and coffee tapioca didn’t taste very interesting to me when they were cold; they lacked the ‘comforting’ element that real coffee and tea have for me after being out on the farm. So, after building up the contents of the tube, I could dip the ends of the tube in hot water to heat the contents in a focused way without melting anything (I wrapped the tube with a bit of plastic wrap just to keep water from leaking into anything). This worked really nicely; the pearls were warm and the hay cream was contrastingly cold. In these platings, I found that the more time passed between assembling the tube and eating it, the more the cream in the center heated up. A better way to do this might be to load the pearls all in one side, and fill the other half with cream, just to keep the two better-separated, and also to allow the cold cream to be the first thing  one tastes as one sucks on the tube.

I plated a few of these, and Sarah and I tried them. They tasted…pretty good! Good in an interesting, academic way more than in a mind-blowingly delicious way. It felt that my choices of flavors had definite potential, but it hit me while we were eating them that my presentation wasn’t really very good. I’d built this thing up because I wanted to find interesting uses for these tubes, but in the midst of giving attention to the personal details of this I’d forgotten to consider the presentation itself. Tapioca pearls and the chewy texture they offer make a ton of sense when infused with bubble gum, but way, way less sense in this context. My experience with my family on a winter morning on our farm has nothing at all to do with tapioca pearls or ‘chewiness’. So, while I still liked my ideas for the flavors, I decided I needed to present them in a different way–the tube wasn’t the right way to do this.

About the time I was working on this, Sarah was working on a few recipes from the Momofuku Milk Bar book. The book has a nice little section on making “crumbs”, and when she made a chocolate crumb it immediately reminded me of dirt. Working from her recipe, I swapped around some of the ingredients to make a coffee ‘soil’ that looked like the clumpy frozen dirt on our farm. This could be served warm and would carry the coffee flavor, I thought, and might give me a more interesting palette to build on. The soil was made with decaf Illy grounds, almond flour, a bit of dutch-process cocoa, flour, sugar, and butter. I made three batches before I honed in on one that tasted nice to Sarah and I…deeply coffee-like without being cloyingly sweet.

I shifted the hay cream idea over into an ice cream, which I figured would contrast nicely with the warm coffee dirt. I had a further idea to try to make something that resembled hay, since I had a ‘dirt’ already. I made a concentrated tea of cardamom, clove, star anise, and black peppercorn, mixed it with Pure-Cote, dried it overnight on some sheets, cut it into thin strips, and dehydrated the strips into thin cardamom-flavored aroma films…sort of like Listerene Breath Strips. They were thick enough to be crispy but disappeared quickly in the mouth, leaving behind the sense of chai tea.

Finally, I wanted to rework the Oak Gel a little. I’d used up all the oak water from my barrel, so rather than waiting another several weeks to age more, I wondered how I could fast-track it. I could steep some oak chips in hot water (this probably would have worked well), but I decided to do something a little weirder: I bought some bourbon, and burned off all the alcohol. I figured this would leave behind some super-aged “oak water”. What I ended up with tasted very strongly of oak, but also has this odd tartness, sort of like vinegar. I mixed it with sugar, agar, and my hay ash to punch up the charred sensation, and added black pepper to get a tiny bit of back-of-the-throat burn. I was aiming for “fireplace gel”.

I plated all of this on one of Crucial Detail’s recently-released Drift plates, which are unglazed porcelain and flat middle-grey in color. Martin explained he picked this color hoping it would be a suitable palette for presenting neutral-colored foods that don’t present well on white; my components seemed to fit this so I gave it a shot.

I feel like what I ended up with was a small improvement in concept, but still not 100% awesome. It looks a little drab on the grey plate, and the flavors are also a little drab and lifeless. I could argue that this is appropriately-poetic, given I’m trying to represent a barnyard in winter, but I think the ultimate goal should combine all of these PLUS super-great flavors. As it stands, I didn’t really feel compelled to eat more than a few spoonfuls of this. Sarah deemed the fireplace gel weird and she’s right. The de-alcohol’d bourbon is interesting and I’d like to see if it’s useful, but I didn’t really totally love the final result (plus it was cold, which I think is a little odd if trying to represent the nature of charred oak in a fireplace). I liked playing with the Drift plate; its shape is great and I loved ‘gluing’ the dirt to the high-rise curves with a bit of honey to hold it impossibly in place.

While I don’t feel like I hit anything out of the park here, I do feel like I’m onto something interesting. Part of my creative process is iteration and refinement. I’m putting my pencil down on this one for now to let it sit in my head, and will hope ideas for improvement will occur to me down the road.

On the flipside, the parts for my bubblegum tube case came back from Ponoko; I spent the week staining the parts and gluing up the box. The outside is jet black, while the inside is rubbed so the wood grain shows through. Rather than dealing with hinges, I embedded small rare earth magnets along the perimeter of the box and lid, so the lid just snaps into place when the box is covered.

 

 

 

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Skittles, Repurposed

So, this one was Sarah’s idea.

On tasting the Bubblegum Tube,  she noted how pretty the electric-pink tapioca pearls were in the tube. “Oh man, can you do this with Skittles? YOU SHOULD DO THIS WITH SKITTLES!” Skittles are to Sarah what Gym, Tanning, and Laundry are to the Jersey Shore posse, which is to say “the source of most of her strength”.

I immediately agreed that some Skittles Science was absolutely necessary. We ran to CVS the next day and bought out every bag of Skittles they had, came home, and sorted them into individual colors. I weighed each Skittle color with an equal part water, then brought the mix to boil until the Skittles dissolved.

You guys, I literally made Skittles Soup.

Using the 5 Skittle-flavored stocks, I soaked more tapioca pearls and then cooked them until they were tender and chewy:

Are you ready for some amazing Skittles Fun Facts? HOLD ON TO YOUR HATS!:

–Of all the colors, we found there were more Yellows than any other.

–There were the fewest Greens.

–When cooking down the Skittles, after a few seconds I could see the candy shells disappearing. I was surprised to notice the interiors were colored to match the candy shell…for the most part. Within each color, there are a few ‘mixups’…green interiors coated with red shells, or purple interiors coated with orange shells. When I noted this to Sarah, she exclaimed “Oh noes! Skittles Factory Fuck-Up!”. I’d like to believe there is a giant red button on the wall somewhere in a Skittles Factory that a moustachioed worker can hit and yell “HOLD THE LINE!” while a blaring alarm sounds to alert the workers that standards are not being upheld, but clearly I have evidence to the contrary.

–There is a very oily component to Skittles; when cooking the stock, this oily residue collects on the surface. When the stock cools, it congeals on the surface. I have no idea what it is. Clearly I needed a ‘raft’ to help clarify my Skittles Stock. #haHACookingJokes! #seriouslyItWasGross

–The color, flavor, and aroma of the individual stocks held steady for numerous boiling/cooling cycles…well beyond the abilities of any other ingredient I’ve ever worked with. The only thing I noticed was that the purple color seemed to drift towards red after several heatings. Conclusion: the ‘blue’ part of the purple Skittles is likely the most natural ingredient in them.

When Sarah saw/tasted the final tube of all the Skittlefied tapioca pearls, she was delighted. She said the flavor was clearly there, but ‘milder’ than of actual Skittles.

I decided something that was missing was a crispy outer candy shell. Using a technique described in A Day At ElBulli, I heated up some Isomalt in a saucepan and dipped a small ring cutter into it once it’d melted. When I lifted the cutter out, a film formed around the dipped end. I dropped the tapioca pearls through the film one at a time; they cooled it instantly as they hit it, and as they fell through it, the film wrapped around them to form a very thin ‘shell’.

Sarah didn’t like these as much; the ‘candy coating’ has a stick-in-your-teeth quality that she didn’t dig on. I kinda liked the crispiness though. One problem with this was that the wet pearls eventually (after 5 minutes or so) dissolved through the sugar. The elBulli dudes did it with oil, so they didn’t run into this problem. I guess maybe I should go back and try to save some of that Skittles Fat to do this with.

No, that would be ridiculous.

 

 

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I just noticed…

…what my folder structure looks like in my photography software. So far, I’ve taken over 6500 photos during the course of this project.

Maybe I should make some sort of…mosaic out of the images? Like…like some sort of  ”Alinea Mosaic“? #terribleAlineaGeekJokes #itsTooEarly #needCoffee

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Bubble Gum, Long Pepper, Hibiscus, Creme Fraiche

Happy (extremely-belated) New Year!

Many of my New Year’s resolutions revolve around this project; I deliberately took a break from it over the holiday season to reflect a bit on it and decide how I’d like to approach it this year.

I have a tendency (which I increasingly dislike) to compare myself to others in unfairly-competitive ways. At work, I tend to look around at peers who are my age and take note of things like their job titles and mentally check to see if I’m ‘ahead of’ or ‘behind them’ in terms of career progress. At the studio at which I previously worked, this demon ultimately consumed me; I got into this spiral of constantly comparing myself to other friends who had joined the studio around the same time I did, who ultimately ‘passed me up’ in terms of title/responsibility/salary, and rather than focusing on just doing good work, I lost myself in a sea of worry about how much I saw myself as ‘lagging’.

A good friend of mine in New Zealand noticed me struggling with this, and lamented aloud to me one day “You’re just all wrapped up in your head about this. I remember when you first got here, you were just fascinated by doing cool shit. All your forward progress came from that. But you’re not interested in the ‘doing cool shit’ bit anymore, you’re just worried about the ladder-climbing, and that’s why you’re inherently not doing it well.” The observation and implied advice was clear and memorable.

From the start of this project, I’ve sought to do a good job with it. “A good job” has turned into a moving target for me, and defining it has been the source of no small amount of thought over the past few weeks. Initially, “a good job” involved making something from the Alinea cookbook that was simply edible. This quickly evolved into making something that was pretty, and closely-resembled what I see in the book. Simultaneously, I started learning how to taste things more sensitively, and “a good job” involved tweaks and adjustments to yield a final product that tasted as good as possible.

Once I started getting the hang of things, doing “a good job” took a turn for the vague. At times it’s been about comparing myself to others working through this cookbook or even other chefs who do this professionally; I want to be able to keep up and when I can’t I get down on myself about it. It’s also drifted towards seeking recognition, trying to go fast, or any number of other motivations symptomatically stemming from a desire for popularity.  I got jammed up trying to rip through recipes quickly, thinking this might indicate I was ‘doing it well’ while simultaneously worrying about seeming stagnant, letting too much time pass between writings, or otherwise being slow, which I equate with ‘potentially-uninteresting’ to anyone who reads this.

All of this was largely fruitless and came at the cost of gaining a deeper understanding of things, taking time to explore and experiment, and generally being thorough to my own satisfaction.

Reflecting on this led me to see the dangers of it. Doing anything for the sole purpose of seeking popularity or approval is lame, and ultimately makes one wholly a servant to the opinions of others. Most Cool Shit I tend to be attracted to stems from someone doing something they really love, really well. This, in fact, was the whole reason I started doing this in the first place: because I saw some guys in Chicago doing Cool Shit and I wanted to play too.

My resolutions, then, involve letting go of the sense of competition, trying to be ok with being patient, and keeping tabs on my motivations for my decisions. I hope that through this I’ll find growth rather than simply pushing up numbers on my “How many dishes have I finished?” list.

(a side note: I’ve read and reread, edited and re-edited the above sentiment for weeks before ultimately deciding that part of doing a good job involves being honest).

To that end, I’ve spent the past few months researching and working on something I’ve wanted to do for a while: make a service piece. I’ve wanted to gain a greater appreciation for the complexities of manufacturing the amazing serviceware Alinea uses, and what better way than to dive in and make something of my own?

“My own” is a little bit of a misnomer: when we ate at Alinea last year, one of the more compelling courses for me was what I’ll call “The Bubblegum Tube”. The course is comprised of tapioca pearls flavored of bubblegum sitting inside a glass tube; the tapioca is paired with hibiscus, creme fraiche, and long pepper gel. It was delicious, and I couldn’t get over how cool the presentation was.

Crucial Detail doesn’t sell this piece as a product. This isn’t surprising; it’s just a little glass tube. I wanted to try recreating it, but wanted to augment it by making my own ‘pedestal’ for the tube to sit on. Most of Crucial Detail’s serviceware is made of stainless steel, so to keep my piece in the same universe as Alinea’s, I knew I’d need to learn some things about working with metals. My goal was to design and make something that could sit on a shelf alongside Martin’s stuff and look comparable to the many things he’s designed for the restaurant (or, at least, not completely pathetic).

The obvious first step was to go to the source and email Martin himself to ask him some questions. I mentioned to him what I wanted to try to learn, asked if he could offer some clues about what materials I should be searching for, and what manufacturing and finishing processes I should familiarize myself with. He answered–as always–directly and richly, offering up clues about the process of working with metals.

I needed to first make soem glass tubes. I went back to my friends at Adams & Chittenden to describe to them what I was after. My description was “about the diameter and length of a Sharpie”.  I picked this after grabbing several pens and otherwise straw-shaped things sitting on my desk, sticking them in my mouth, and trying to estimate how pleasing they each were to suck on. Adams & Chittenden responded with a suggestion of some borosilicate tubing with an inner diameter of 10mm and an outer diameter of 13mm, and a length of 70mm per tube.

Making the tubes took about a week, and a set of 8 of them cost me around $35. While this work was being done, I started thinking about what I wanted the ‘pedestal’ on which the tube would sit would look like. Knowing absolutely nothing about working with metal, I just started mocking up arbitrary shapes in 3d software. I wanted something that would look balanced and would be nice to touch. I also wanted to keep things simple. I came up with these three designs:



Not really knowing what to do next, I searched for machinists in the Bay Area. I emailed a few shops, explaining what I wanted but that I didn’t know much about fabricating metal…basically I was hoping to find someone who could help me through the process and have some patience as I learned what I was doing. I got only one gruff response from a place in Berkeley suggesting that my design was very complicated and would be very expensive, and recommending I come up with something simpler.

I didn’t really understand what about my designs were super-complicated; the first one in particular seemed so straightforward that it was almost boring. I emailed out at work asking if anyone knew anything about doing this.

This is how I met Drew.

“What are you trying to machine?” he originally responded, simply and directly. I emailed him my renderings and explained what I’d run into. “Why don’t you come down to my office, it’ll be easier to talk about this in person.” he suggested.

Drew used to be a machinist before coming to work at our studio. He’s a big guy with rough hands that have been stained of something every time I’ve been around him. Most offices in a visual effects studio are stacked with books with titles like “Programming Mental Ray 3.1″ or “Fluid Dynamics, by Robert Bridson”. Drew’s office was littered with machine parts, metal bits and bobs, and wood scraps. I immediately liked him.

He explained to me that the thing that made my first design difficult was the tapered sides. Machining tends to work most-easily at right angles; tapered sides get into fixturing problems that suck up a lot of conceptual time. He explained to me how one would make the cuts that were needed to yield the shapes I’d designed, which highlighted for me exactly what design choices were ‘expensive’. I was fascinated.

“It’s unlikely you’ll convince a machine shop to do this for you. It would take them more time to set up their tools and rigs to get the angles right than it would for them to actually make the cuts. And, because you’re not ordering 500 of these, they can’t realize any economies of scale with you. Also, stainless steel is a huge pain in the ass to work with; you have to go real slow because the metal is so hard, and if you try to move too quickly the heat will harden the steel, which makes it unworkable and will wreck your machinery. Maybe you wanna think about starting with an easier metal.”

It was becoming clear that I’d be making these myself.

By this point, the Christmas holidays were hurtling towards us. I’d picked up my glass tubes from Adams & Chittenden, and they were great. Sarah was working a bit of last-minute overtime in the days leading up to our holiday break, so I took the opportunity to try to learn a bit more about how one machines metal.

I jumped into a last-minute Milling Machine class, a 3-hour crash-course introducing me to one of the main machines I’d need to learn to make these things, at San Francisco’s downtown TechShop. TechShop is a completely-badass idea in theory; it’s a huge workshop filled with every kind of “make something cool” machine conceivable. There are machinery mills and lathes, woodworking tools, CNC routers, bead blasters, vinyl printers, welding stations…it’s seriously awesome. The barrier to entry, however, is a $90 class one must take to be ‘checked out’ on a machine before one can use it. These classes are short and basically just run you through the fundamentals of turning the machine on and off and how to keep from getting killed using it. The Milling class I took was eye-opening insofar as I understood better what was involved in cutting a piece of metal and generally how the machine worked, but there was little context, and I walked away knowing only that I’d need to take more classes to get checked out on more machine AND would need to hire one of TechShop’s “Dream Coaches” to help guide me through the fabrication process to actually make my part. It was daunting and not very affordable.

A good thing about the class though was having a better understanding of how to design for the machinery I’d be using. This part was exciting for me; understanding how one maneuvered metal around these machines made Crucial Detail’s steel service pieces even more interesting to me. I could clearly and easily see how they weren’t just arbitrary shapes anymore, had been designed with an eye towards manufacturing efficiency. I went back to my 3d software to work on some new designs.

Drew had pointed me to a good resource for sourcing raw metal stock; the aptly-named onlinemetals.com. Taking a look through the stock shapes they offered of stainless steel, the round tubes and bars caught my eye. I liked the idea of echoing the cylindrical glass tube’s shape in the pedestal design, so I played around with ways of cutting tubes/rounds:










The “upside down” ones came from a further idea I had about playing with balance (loading one end of the tube with a denser ingredient and setting it off-center in the pedestal might look interesting). Drew reminded me that tapered sides were difficult, and to avoid introducing too many variables at once, I chose one of the simpler designs to carry through the fabrication process:

With Drew’s guidance, I fleshed out a “spec” for my design. This just meant identifying measurements and tolerances that I cared about, that would guide a machinist through the final desired dimensions. Being used to Alinea’s use of the metric system, I continued through with that here; ultimately I found metric machining tools to be tricky to find, so I deferred to imperial approximations once I got going.

My next step was ordering some stock and the proper tools with which to do the machining. I ordered 12″-long pieces of 1.875″-diameter 303 Stainless Steel, as well as the same size of aluminium for prototyping. When they showed up a few days later, I was struck by how heavy both rounds were, especially the stainless, which weighed around 8 lbs.

Milling machines are sort of like giant dill presses–there’s a downward-pointing vertical motor-driven spindle into which can fit any number of cutting mechanisms. This cutting bit (called an “End Mill”) spins while the machinist moves the part around under it, passing it past the cutter using one of three moving axes. A digital gauge allows for incredibly-precise incremental movements of this 3-axis workbench; one can make cuts that are accurate to 1/1000 of an inch.

Because I was working with a very hard metal, I knew I’d need some high-performance end mills with which to work. I bought a 1″-diameter 4-flute carbide end mill, and a 0.5″ 4-flute ball-end carbide end mill. The former would be use to ‘face’ (ensure complete flatness) of my straight surfaces; the latter has a rounded cutting tip and would be what I’d use to cut the channel into which my tube would sit.

For the actual fabrication, Drew graciously offered to help. He has all his machinist’s equipment set up in a workshop on his property, so one weekend I packed up my gear and headed to his place for some tutelage.

The first step in fabricating this was to cut off a disc from the stainless steel round (“slabbing it off”, Drew called it). We did this using a horizontal band saw, which uses gravity to pull the blade down through the piece being cut. I was aiming for a final width of 1″, so we cut slabs about 1/8″ wider than that to allow for facing the slab (to ensure both sides were flat and parallel).

(This is a piece of aluminium I was using for prototyping purposes)

I then faced the slabs on a lathe to my final width of 1″, going as slowly as I could to ensure as smooth a finish as possible (knowing that any tool marks I left on the steel would have to be sanded out later, which I suspected wouldn’t be super-happy fun times). After facing the slabs, I drilled two holes in each slab, so that I could bolt the slabs to a bit of square aluminium (which would make the next step of holding the slab in a vice a bit more stable). These slabs were then cut with the bandsaw again on either side of the bolts, to yield two half-moon shapes.

I used my 1″ end mill to face the just-cut sides of the half-moons, to ensure they were flat and all of uniform size, again going as slowly as I could to minimize tool marks.

The last step was flipping over the parts and using my ball end mill to cut a groove that would cradle the glass tube.

Sarah joined me for the day, armed with her camera:

The whole process took about 8 hours, and at the end of the day I had 10 completed pieces to take home. I was completely ecstatic; the amount of precision involved in getting them all to be exactly the same was so fascinating and satisfying to my OCD tendencies. But I knew I wasn’t done; the parts looked nice but had tool marks all over them, hard edges with burrs, and lots of other cosmetic flaws. They neither looked nor felt inviting, and that was the most important part of all of this to me; I wanted a piece that looked beautiful and invited one to touch and feel it, to pick it up and inspect it. These looked sharp and a little dangerous.

I bought a random orbital sander and several packs of sandpaper in various grits. The first (and most arduous) step was getting rid of all tool marks on the pieces. This was most difficult on the bottoms of the pieces, where the end milling had left deep circular gashes. I started with 80 grit and slowly, slowly, slowly started stepping up through the entire grit range. After 8 hours of sanding, I was halfway done. I’d made it up to 220 grit and the parts had started taking on a satiny texture and a very smooth, silky feel.

The next day, I pressed on for another 8 hours or so, stepping up to a final grit of 600. I worried the difference would be too subtle to notice, but when I compared a piece finished to 600 grit to one finished to 220 grit, it was night and day:

I used some sandpaper wrapped around a Sharpie to brush out the interior grooves. Though they were a little coarser-finished than I would have liked, the grooves caught light in an interesting way that makes them look contrastingly-different depending on how the light hits them; I thought this effect was neat.

At the final 600 grit, I also ‘kissed’ the edges of the part gently, to put a tiny, tiny bevel on them so they wouldn’t feel quite so jagged to the touch, but still looked sharp and precisely-angular. There was also a little visual benefit; the tiny bevel causes the part to catch light on the edges, which in turn makes it look more sharp and precise. You can see in the previous photos the lack of this edge highlight.

After all the sanding and polishing, I wanted to take some photos to see how everything looked. I bought some wool suit fabric and stretched it over some foam core to try something a little different with the photography. I like the fabric, but think it might not be 100% right for this particular servicepiece, which is greyish on its own. It’s not quite as striking on the grey fabric.

Storing the pieces is a little bit of a concern for me; I don’t want them to get scratched up or banged around in a cabinet, and want a nice way of storing them when not in use. When living in New Zealand, I found a small company called Ponoko that did custom fabrication based on an uploaded design. They’ve since gone international, and have a fabrication hub in San Francisco. I wanted to design a little box to hold my pieces, and decided to use Ponoko for the fabrication of it. I mocked up a design for the box in 3d software again, playing with some ideas for how I’d like to finish the wood that the box would be made of.

I exported the plans for my box as curves to Adobe Illustrator, then uploaded the files to Ponoko. The curves described cutting lines to be made by a laser cutter. These are exploded views to show how what the individual pieces look like and how they fit together.

As of this writing I’m still waiting to get these parts back from Ponoko; I’ll include photos of the box in a later post once I’ve gotten it assembled.

A critical and tricky step to filling these tubes with food of any sort is that they need to stand vertically to be filled. The ends can be plugged with gelled flavors, but this requires they be stood in warm liquid and moved to a fridge to be allowed to cool. This seemed tricky and potentially-annoying to me, so I wanted to make another accessory to help make my life a little easier. I decided to make a foodsafe silicon mold with 8 holes in it, which would hold the tubes upright and steady while they were moved from one location to another. I did some searching for foodsafe silicon kits, and settled on one that seemed reasonably-priced from the aptly-named makeyourownmolds.com. What I got was a two-part pourable silicon mix that works a lot like a two-part epoxy: just mix in equal parts, pour, and let set.

I made a frame out of plexiglass held together with bulldog clips to serve as the ‘sides’ of my mold, and another piece of plexiglass was the bottom. I used clay to stick my tubes into place on the plexi, then weighed them from the top with a clay brick to help hold them firm and steady as I poured the silicon around them.

The silicon itself was easy to mix and pour; I used about a half-cup to fill the mold, then let it set for 4 hours, after which I could remove the tubes and outer casing and let cure overnight to completion.

After making my servicepieces, storage box, and silicon holder, I wanted to actually make some food that used all these things. This dish draws obvious inspiration from (and is a clever interpretation of) asian “Bubble Teas”, which are usually flavored soda/tea with flavor-infused ‘bubbles’ in the bottom of the tea cup. They’re typically served with a large-diameter plastic straw, which is helpful for sucking up the ‘bubbles’, which are actually cooked tapioca pearls.

My first step was to make some bubblegum stock. I started looking for what I consider to be a pretty classic bubblegum:

I found it hard to track down a large amount of this in bulk; Sarah reminded me of an even MORE classic gum that I could easily find in bags at places like Target.

She was totally right; for about $3 I came home with 2 lbs of delicious bubble gum. I unwrapped it all, weighed it, and put it in a pot with an equal part water and 10% sugar (the sugar amount was just a guess). I cooked it until my kitchen smelled like bubblegum, laughing most of the time. This was seriously the funnest/funniest thing I’ve tried so far. After about 10-15 minutes of cooking, I had a pot full of water that tasted powerfully like bubble gum.

A side note: I wouldn’t wish the cleanup of this on my worst enemy. It was awful…but still hilarious to me.

Next, I needed to cook some tapioca pearls in the stock. This took me several tries to get right; large tapioca pearls are tricky to cook evenly throughout. Mine were either undercooked in the center (which made them reminiscent of undercooked pasta) or cooked through the center but a bit too gelatinous on the outer surface. What I finally ended up doing was letting them soak for several hours in warm stock, then pressure-cooking them for 45 minutes; this yielded something I was happy with.

I heated the creme fraiche to just under a simmer with the seeds of some vanilla beans and some sugar, then stored that in a squeeze bottle in the fridge. For the hibiscus gel, I steeped some hibiscus flowers in hot water for about 20 minutes, strained, then warmed with gelatin and poured into a sheet tray to set. Lastly I made long pepper gel similarly, poured that into a small tray, and set my tubes vertically in the gel to let it set (I used my ‘tube mold’ to hold the group of 8 tubes upright as I moved them into and out of the fridge).

The tubes are loaded bottom-to-top with several bubblegum pearls, the creme fraiche, and finally the hibiscus gel (which I picked at with a spoon until it had the consistency of store-bought jelly before loading it into the tube). Because one end of the tube is sealed and all the ingredients are wet, once they’re loaded into the tube they tend to stay firmly in place from suction. This made plating and serving them extremely straightforward.

Finally, finally, finally, after all this, Sarah and I sat down to taste one. Honestly I was a terrified; even though I’d been very careful to taste as I went, checking everything along the way, after this much effort anything less than awesome would bum me out.

Awesomely enough though, it was awesome.

Even better than awesome, in fact! It was exactly perfect for me; it tasted exactly as I remembered it tasting at Alinea. Not cloyingly sweet, very well-balanced, and startling in the flavor progression. The tart, bright acidity of the hibiscus is the first thing I tasted, which gave way seamlessly to the creme fraiche, its subtle sourness blending wonderfully into the vanilla it was cooked with, then the bright pink unmistakable flavor of classic bubblegum. The tapioca pearls were perfectly chewy; it almost felt like the dish should come with a mom-scolding for swallowing the ‘gum’. Punctuating the bite was the distinctive aromatic peppery bite of the long pepper gel capping the ends of the tube. It was great, and a satisfying way for me to get the year started.

 

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