A few people have mentioned curiosity about the photography side of this project, so rather than detail the production of the dish itself (I cooked a bunch of shit, then plated it. It was hard.), I thought I might talk a little about the other side of things for me. Since moving to the Bay Area (with a little less dedicated photography space) I’ve made quite a bit of use of a light tent, which I expound on a bit in this post. For this dish I wanted to get out some of my other gear and play with it a bit. Specifically, I wanted to work with my softbox. I have this model:

A softbox is nice for representing a large area of light, rather like a window or a skylight. My softbox is small enough to be ‘portable’ but big enough to be a pain in the ass to set up in our small dining area, which is why I don’t use it a ton. It’s great for portraiture, but it splashes light around everywhere so can be a little tough to use in small spaces.

A good softbox is nicer than my light tent because of the very lovely quality of light it provides. I use my softbox with a small, portable flash usually mounted on a camera (these are called “strobes”, not because they oscillate on and off like a 70′s disco but because they ‘flash’, rather than staying on all the time. Think high school senior portrait rather than super-hot garage work light). I tuck the strobe into a small opening at the rear of the softbox, like so:

I like this particular softbox because as you can see it’s got an inner sheet that obfuscates the light, in addition to another outer sheet (not pictured, I attach it later); this offers very soft, broad lighting. This comes at a cost of a slight loss of light intensity, but that’s easily-correctable. My light tent is much smaller and easier to set up/break down, but it only offers one diffusion layer between my subject  and the light, so the light isn’t quite as soft.

For my shot setup, I laid out two layers of fine linen on the table. I spent about 30 minutes ironing the linen so that it was very flat and smooth. I have a black tri-fold backdrop I made with black tape and foam core that I set up as a background; it’s built sort of like how you built your science fair project posters back in the day (you can see it sitting near the table in the lower right of frame there):

Here’s an early test shot on my linen with the foam core backdrop and a bare strobe light. Note that the strobe when used on its own sort of looks like a really harsh spotlight. It offers very crisp, sharp shadows, which look garish and make clear where the light is coming from. This kind of lighting is ok if I wanted something really dramatic, but I don’t really love its harshness in this context, so I generally try to avoid it for this particular project.

Here’s the same setup, except I’m using the softbox. Note how the shadows now become very soft and the light has a bit more of a ‘wash’ quality to it. It feels more natural and also more sensual, which is what I’m after. Things look a little more delicate. One can simulate the same thing by plating something near a large window; a window offers soft shadows like this, and there’s a slight blue tint from the daylight that I’m capturing a bit here with my lights. Note how the texture in the linen looks a little softer…more touchable.

I decide to add a piece of white foamcore to the right side of the table, outside the right of frame. When the light coming in from the left hits this, it bounces off of it back into my scene, which fills in darker areas. If I used something more reflective (like, say, a mirror or a cookie tin), I’d get more of a focused bounce; the white foam core diffuses the light again, which makes things even softer. This is a matter of preference; I like very soft light, so I choose to go this route. Here’s what the foam core offers; notice the right side of the pedestal bases is a bit brighter, and the shadows they cast have been a bit faded towards the right side of frame.

I like the quality of my light, but the white linen against the black foamcore background is giving me a horizon line. This is distracting to me; if I don’t carefully-place that horizon line (by shifting the camera up or down) it can cause a sense of tension, which undoes the nice softness my light is giving me. I try replacing the black foamcore with a piece of white foamcore:

This is better, but I still have a line there. It’s very soft, but to me it’s distracting. I opt to make what’s called a “seamless backdrop”; this is where the ‘floor’ of a scene bends up to become the background of the scene, which eliminates harsh horizon lines like the ones we see here. Sometimes you see these referred to as “infinity backgrounds”; the idea is to create the illusion that the floor of the scene extends back into infinity. I made this by using some bulldog clips to clip the back edge of my linen to the black foamcore backdrop:

I also use some painter’s tape to hold the foam core in place, so that the weight of the linen doesn’t pull it around. Painter’s tape is rad because it comes off very cleanly, without tearing up my foamcore.

Here’s the final setup I arrive at. Note the actual size of the pedestals, as well as the placement of the white bounce card. It’s extremely frequently that I end up with a setup like this–one that requires me to contort myself around a light stand or something to actually get the camera where I need it to be.

A side note: you can see I’m building up a very white environment for these shots; the softbox works well in this case because it scatters so much light everywhere. If I wanted a solid black environment, the softbox becomes way harder to control. I’d want light on the pedestals but not on the foamcore background. Usually this means I need more space, to move the foamcore away from the light. This is why I don’t shoot many darker environments with this lighting setup in our current apartment…I need sort of a long, deep room to get that working well.

Now that I think I’m happy with the lighting, I try a few test shots that more-closely approximate the final composition I want. I like shooting the food the way one might shoot either landscapes or architecture. Usually for either of these we’re looking either eye-level or up at things; there’s a sense of awe and beauty that photographers usually try to convey with landscape or architecture photography, and I think it suits this food nicely. Compositionally, this means I want to get my camera low and as close to the food as possible; I want the composition to be immersive.

Because I’m shooting tiny things with a macro lens (a Canon 50mm macro, as well as a Canon 100mm macro…I switch back and forth a lot but usually stick to just those two lenses), I get a very shallow depth of field (e.g. lots of ‘blur’). This is a product of being very, very close to the subject I’m shooting. Usually with landscapes or architecture, you’re not very close to the subject, so everything’s in focus. I kinda like the unexpected juxtaposition of these two things here.

Now, how about some actual photos of food?

These 5 bites are lined up in the order in which they’re eaten. I simmered fresh hearts of palm in water seasoned with sugar and salt, then cut them into small cylinders and used a chopstick to help poke out the central sections, leaving just the outer ring. I filled the first of these rings with a ‘vanilla pudding’; this stuff is totally amazing. Basically I made vanilla ice cream–i.e. vanilla, egg, cream, milk, sugar, cooked into a custard. The custard was augmented with agar, which helps the texture remain stable at room temperature. It’s wild; it tastes like room-temperature ice cream in both taste and texture. The ring is topped with avocado dice, a vanilla-lime vinaigrette, and a ring of Thai chili.

The taste of all of this together is drop-dead delicious. There’s a sweetness to Thai chili I never knew existed, but that shines brightly with the vanilla custard and compliments it well. It’s a slightly sweet bite; the heart of palm is crunchy and fresh, but most of what I taste is vanilla and chili. This one might be my favorite.

Next we have a palm ring filled with fava bean puree. Breaking and peeling 500g of fava beans for this recipe takes…no small amount of time. The beans are cooked and pureed with oil and seasoned with salt before filling the palm cylinder. The bite is topped with preserved meyer lemon skin (that little yellow loop there? That took 3 months to make), a meyer lemon vinaigrette, and I put a broccoli rabe blossom on there just for funsies.

This bite tasted lovely, citrusy, springtime-y. The fava bean as a unique and definite flavor, though I can’t really articulate it. It tastes…’green’. And fresh.The Meyer lemon peel is tart, sweet-salty, tangy. This on might be my favorite.

Next we have a bite filled with a bulgur salad, topped with a chive and a garlic chip. The bulgur salad is made from cooked bulgur wheat mixed with a freaking awesome roasted garlic mayonnaise (roast garlic, puree with some vinegar and a lot of grapeseed oil) and some chopped chives. The stuff is delicious.

The garlic chip starts as several cloves of elephant garlic that get blanched in milk, pureed, smeared on a dehydrator tray and dehydrated for several hours, then broken into small, paper-thin crisps. They’re crunchy like a tiny little potato chip, but salty and season-y and compliment the bulgur salad perfectly. This one was definitely my favorite.

The 4th bite is a palm heart filled with prune puree. I boiled the prunes multiple times in water until very tender, then pureed with a tiny bit of vinegar until smooth and sturdy.

The bite is topped with minced dehydrated nicoise olive. The olive chunks are topped with a pretty-amazing coffee/sherry-vinegar syrup. This stuff is mind-blowing; it’s sweet and tangy and coffee-y…I need to remember these flavors for making a bbq sauce sometime later. Overall this bite is magic; the tang from the olive and syrup hit the tongue first, then give way to the sweetness of the prune and sugar in the coffee syrup. It’s sort of like listening to a person build a chord on the piano one note at a time; the flavors just keep adding up to a nice harmony. Hands-down my favorite one.

The final bite involves a black truffle and pumpernickel puree. This is made with black truffle juice warmed with pumpernickel bread and mixed with an immersion blender until the bread causes a paste to form. The bite is topped with a vinaigrette made with black truffle, sherry vinegar, and oil. I was meant to also garnish the bite with a thin slice of fresh Perigord black truffle, but given the expense of this past week I opted to skimp on it, replacing it with a dot of pudding made from more black truffle juice. My adoration of black truffle probably made this one my favorite.

I love this dish! It’s so damn pretty, way less finicky to get working than I expected, and the flavor combinations were all a total surprise, even in the face of tasting everything copiously as I went. Almost everything turned out tasting bang-on the first try (I had to add way more pumpernickel bread to the truffle juice to get it to form a paste, and even then it had a tendency to want to ooze more easily than the others, but it still tasted great). This is a good way to start off the Spring menu.

This past Wednesday, Sarah, myself, my sister and three friends all flew to Chicago from various locations to dine at Next for their current El Bulli menu.

If you worry I’m going to launch into a detailed play-by-play of our meal, please don’t. The food was good, the beverage pairings really good, and while I’ll elaborate on this in a moment, it will be only slightly.

I’ve been excited to dine at Next since it opened. Having gotten to play an extremely tiny but awesome role in the early days of it’s launch, I’ve had a slight emotional investment in it as its grown, and have always kept my eye open for an opportunity to visit. I also, for obvious reasons, have an acute fascination with El Bulli itself; I tried for years to secure a reservation at the restaurant (all unsuccessful), and its closing–that finality of knowing I’d never get to experience firsthand something that clearly represents a cultural revolution–was a little heartbreaking for me. So when Next announced that this menu would be an homage to El Bulli, my interest in visiting went from “next time we’re in Chicago we should try to check it out” to “This is a moral imperative.”

I don’t fly to Chicago terribly often; it’s expensive and mandates me taking time off work to spend any significant amount of time there. But for this very special, once-in-a-lifetime thing, I decided I was all in. I convinced Sarah and four other great people that this meal at the Kitchen Table at Next on a Wednesday Night would be worth not only its own total value of $2863, but also worth the nearly $600 per-person extra it would cost each of us to fly in and stay in a hotel for 2 nights. This is not an insignificant sum for any of us at all.

I find that the thing that tends to earn eating-out experiences the highest marks on our spreadsheet and poshest vaults in our memory banks isn’t really only the food. We tend to ask ourselves to regard the experience as a whole. Of course the food should be great, but usually there’s an element of magic involved beyond just the edible that causes us to leave feeling dizzy and bursting with gratefulness. Our most recent rating of “4″ for ourselves (there aren’t many; barely enough to count on one hand) was Plum in downtown Oakland. We sat at the bar (our favorite–I like to watch everyone as they craft the dishes); the chefs picked up quickly that I have more than a passing interest in cooking and started offering us introductions to specific ingredients or extra plates of this or that, encouraging us to taste everything. They were eager to talk with me about techniques and ingredients, geeking out with me at one point about how awesome fresh garbanzo beans look. The pastry chef stopped work during a flurry of dessert orders to talk shop with Sarah a bit about a crumb crust we had and loved (Sarah is to baking what I am to Alinea-cookbooking). The staff was effusive, honest, approachable, perfectly lovely. We left feeling as though we’d just made some new friends.

I like to think (and hope it’s not delusional to do so) that my sincere gratitude, enthusiasm and interest for their work made more of an impression on their night than did the gratuity we left.  I think it’s a natural and honest thing for a person to want to surround themselves with other people with shared interests and passions…this is generally how I regard good friendships. I wasn’t interested in edging for special treatment by the chefs (“schmoozing” isn’t my style) so much as I was geeking out with people who like the same things I do, and I choose to believe they weren’t interested in edging for a fat tip from me so much as enjoying someone taking genuine interest in the minutiae of their work. Enthusiasm begets enthusiasm, and I find that a precious and delightful enough gift to want to share it recklessly.

(I understand that the above sentiment, in the wrong light, implies I think saying “thanks” precludes the need to leave a gratuity. No, I am not suggesting this. But I would imagine tips are more forgettable than enthusiasm.)

Of course, it goes without saying that our first meal at Alinea created in both of us these same feelings; the food was amazing of course, but the experience was so much more than that. It painted an ideal, it set a bar, it codified a perspective that is so compelling and sincere that I’ve felt strongly enough about it to embrace it nearly every day for years (if it’s not obvious, this project demands way more consideration time than just that of weekends). Even awesomer, we walked away from our second meal at Alinea feeling exactly the same way.

Given the way I tend to think about things, the amount of consideration and deliberation I put into choosing to go to this meal, and the cost involved for me and my friends…it should probably be obvious that my expectations were a little on the high side.  I hoped for magic.

Unfortunately, I didn’t quite experience that at Next.

The Kitchen Table at Next is a large round table behind a wall of glass that looks into the kitchen; one is meant to be able to watch the magic happening right there, just inches away.  It’s special in that it’s meant to allow a relationship to exist between the kitchen and we, the diners, but the terms of that relationship weren’t what I hoped for.

One of the first courses of the evening was presented tableside by the executive chef of Next, Dave Beran. He appeared behind a cart lined with smoking vessels of liquid nitrogen, and without much in the way of greeting/welcoming/acknowledging us he launched into stirring and mixing and ‘doing stuff’. In a quiet moment, I (sitting immediately near his right arm) offered congratulations for the recent (Monday evening) win by the restaurant of a James Beard award (for “Best New Restaurant”). In general, lay people have as little reason to know about this award as they do knowing about VES awards for visual effects artists; I hoped my mention of it would suggest to him that I noticed and cared about the intricacies of his work. Without looking up he responded somberly “Yeah, 1 out of 3 isn’t bad I guess” (1 of the 3 nominations was for him personally, Chef Beran, for Rising Star Chef, which was won instead by Christina Tosi of Momofuku Milk Bar). I couldn’t tell if my attempt at giving him a verbal slap on the back offended him or if he felt it was ill-offered or what, but I immediately felt self-conscious and apologetic. For the duration of our meal my impressions of him were that he was relatively disaffected and didn’t really care much at all about conveying a sense of welcome or warmth to the one table in the restaurant he could have easily done so. He spent most of the evening checking his phone or scowling gently at people entering/leaving the kitchen, or at us. There were a few moments when diners were allowed into the kitchen to greet him and get a glimpse of our luxurious view of the kitchen in full action,each of which he paused to speak with before resuming his duties.

The experience of sitting at the Kitchen Table as a whole was a slightly stressful one for me, I found. The chefs shot us concerned glances every few minutes, smileless and scowling…no doubt they were minding the timing of what I know is an incredibly-complex 29-course menu, but I felt less like a guest and more like a specimen, and the barrier between us felt thicker than the plate glass suggested it should. There was no sense of shared enthusiasm, no nod from the action side of the glass that said “Hey, thanks for thinking what we’re doing is rad.”

When Francisco rose at one point to go to the men’s room, it touched off a flurry of points and in-ear whispers and snapped glances at us as they threw the production line into a holding pattern. This I know is standard operating procedure at a high-end place like Next, but God I felt fucking terrible watching it happen. All I could think was “Shit, we just wrecked their next half hour”. Worrying about being wrong for needing to pee isn’t very fun; a part of me hoped they’d built an intermission into the pace of things or otherwise anticipated the inevitable call of nature that accompanies a 29-course wine tasting bonanza, but they had not.

Because some of the seats at the table face away from the kitchen, my friends decided a nice thing might be to trade places halfway through the meal (they chose to action this during a moment when some of us were in the restroom, in an attempt to minimize interruptions to the staff’s flow). Doing this might as well have been akin to whipping out a pile of dynamite and sitting in near the rose vase centerpiece, such was the wave of glances of concern and scrutiny set loose amongst the waitstaff and chefs. I was torn between wanting to apologize profusely for overcomplicating things momentarily and wondering “wait, is this really unreasonable of us? Because Sarah, who’s put up with me talking about this meal for months, has her back to the window and I’d like for her to be able to see some of what’s going on behind her.” Of course no one on the staff openly suggested it was unreasonable of us; I admit this might have been just my own paranoia and clumsy attempt to empathize with them.

The waitstaff themselves were perfectly great; our main waiters were attentive if a little stiff (one’s sense of humor and tone bordered the condescending for my taste), but much of what they had to say felt over-rehearsed and lackluster. I went to see a stand-up performance by Mike Birbiglia once, a comedian who’s hailed for his casual way of storytelling. His routine had the trappings of casual storytelling, but the surgical placement and timing of pregnant pauses and enunciations made it clear that this ‘casual conversation’ was a finely-polished one, and there was no magic to it. So it was with the waitstaff. This meal is meant to sort of be a retrospective history of El Bulli, or as Nick Kokonas described it on Facebook once, “a celebration”. I have several books about El Bulli, have seen the documentary “Cooking, In Progress” 3 times, and in general have a pretty decent understanding of the restaurant; in short, I’ve ‘read the brochure’. But I was greatly looking forward to hearing intricacies of how it was for Next to work with the chefs of El Bulli to recreate things, what problems and collaborations arose from one team striving to replicate and honor the work of another, etc. I mean, their story with El Bulli is my story with Alinea in larger form, so I savored the hope of discovering parallel challenges and/or lessons to be learned. What is it like to try to replicate and honor the art of someone whom you admire? What (omg what) did Adria himself think when he came to see what they had done with his legacy? What should I expect when I have the chance to serve Chef Achatz my interpretation of his own creations?? (I’m seriously kidding…I never, ever expect to do this, nor would I ever hope to. Jesus the pressure).

There was none of this to be found in the waitstaff’s script for the evening, unfortunately. I tried to ask questions that offered them space to talk in this context, but they kept their answers brief and unelaborative, no doubt keeping a sharp eye on the clock for this marathon of a meal. Delaying a minute or two per course chatting with me could tack hours onto our meal, which had a final running time of about 5 hours. But even their clipped responses had a quiet lack of enthusiasm, an absence of recognition of how excited I was determined to stay for this very exciting event.

The food itself was, as mentioned, very good for me, in the same way that I find watching early episodes of the Simpsons to be very good. I.e. it was delicious and–while not the most mind-bogglingly new thing that I’d ever seen–clearly laid the groundwork for restaurants like Alinea to build upon. I Appreciated it with an intentionally-capital A, because examples of the first foam or spherified flavor are like viewing fine art paintings for me, and I greatly respect the effort and consideration involved in replicating El Bulli’s work, the sensitivity with which one must approach interpreting or modifying aspects of things, and the sheer volume of work the chefs have sluiced through to arrive at what was a very nicely-paced and -balanced menu.

Because I think it’s a natural and honest thing for a person to want to surround themselves with other people with shared interests and passions, I dislike the idea that the relationship between staff and diners need be one-way (I also dislike the idea that bidirectionality can only be achieved with fat gratuities). I don’t like being only a taker; I like to try to offer something back–if only the most meager of gestures–and I feel comfortable showing genuine  gratitude for things. To this end, at the conclusion of our meal I paused as we exited and asked if I may step into the kitchen (as I’d seen others do) to thank Chef Beran and offer him some words of appreciation. The kitchen was largely falling quiet at this time, most of the restaurant had finished, and he was working alone at the center countertop cutting up some fish for the next day’s menu. He looked up at me (through me?) a few times, but made no effort to pause his work or acknowledge me, and though a staffmember went to whisper to him that I’d wanted to offer compliments, he forged ahead with the fish butchery until one of the staffmembers uncomfortably stuttered that he might be busy for some time and that maybe I should just leave.

We stepped next door to the Aviary for one final drink to finish the night, and I took a moment to Tweet to him my thanks, suspecting that his proximity to his phone all night would offer some immediacy to this. There has been no response.

I left feeling a little disappointed about the whole thing.

In the time since the meal, I can’t help but reflect on it heavily. I mean, I’ve been planning for this for months. The financial side of it has abbreviated other plans I might have made this year for travel with Sarah. It was hard not to want it to be 100% awesome; for it to be magic.

I find it curious that so much of my impression of the experience extends beyond just the food; is it unfair of me to regard a dining experience based on the relationship I had with the staff? Have I lost sight completely of what I should be focusing on? In addition to being virtuosos in the kitchen, do chefs also need to have reasonably nice personalities to sate my interests, and how obscenely unreasonable is that of me? Or, is the fact that I spend a lot of my reflection time trying to talk myself into or out of perspectives (“Well, Wednesday is their Monday, and everyone hates Mondays; maybe everyone was just kinda tired and not on point, and maybe tomorrow night’s diners will be just blown away” or “Maybe Chef Beran’s dog died just minutes before our meal started” or “Maybe my breath was terrible and the staff just couldn’t deal with my booze-addled questions”) just a lot of rhetoric, and maybe it’s ok for me to regard an experience as, well, an experience?

I’ve tried to be very careful to posit all of this from my own admittedly-unique perspective. I realize my expectations might have been unrealistically-high, that maybe I’m just too close to this stuff, and that my companions for dinner had a totally wonderful time themselves. I get it; this is unique to me, and I wouldn’t suggest others would experience Next this same way. I’m almost apologetic to everyone that I came away feeling this way; I feel bad about it, even, and willing to acknowledge much of it as my own doing. I will deliberate the public airing of these thoughts for a long, long time before having the courage to commit them.

What I will say strongly and without apology though is that thinking of onesself as too busy or important–as Beran seemed wont to do–to take a moment to accept gratitude and praise from someone so clearly invested in the experience of this meal is de facto lame and ungracious. I’m unmotivated to offer further enthusiasm for his work.

“I’d give it a 2, I think”, I told Sarah the next morning. “Maybe a 3. I’m not sure, honestly.”

The “would you spend this same amount of money here again?” question is particularly interesting with Next, because I was forced to buy “Season Tickets” to get access to this one meal. This means I have tickets to two more meals with them. If I didn’t already own the tickets, I wouldn’t spend this same amount of money again there. And even though I do own these other tickets, I’m not sure I’d spend the money it costs to make a special trip to Chicago for 3 days to go to these meals.

As it stands though, Sarah and I have to be back in Chicago in a month to go to a wedding, so we’ll be in town, and the meal is already paid for. At this point, I’m not sure if we’ll go, or if I’ll sell the tickets and see what else Chicago has to offer.

Honestly, for that amount of money, I’d much rather go to Alinea.

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Postscript: a few of the waitstaff offered glimmers of excitement and enthusiasm, most notably one with a nice set of dreads to whom James mentioned that I’d been working on this project and had been especially excited for this meal. The dreadlocked man turned to me with raised eyebrows and asked “Do you keep a blog?” When I (a little embarrassed) nodded in the affirmative, he asked the name and then sort of did a “Ohhhh yyyyeahhh…I think I might have heard of it?” thing in a way that didn’t inspire a ton of confidence but was generous nevertheless. (Perhaps he was thinking of Alineaphile?) As I was leaving Next, he made a point of stopping me to say “Hey keep up the blog, man. It’s cool.” I don’t know if you’re reading this, Mr. Dreads, but that was the highlight of my evening. Thank you.

I’ve been eyeing this dish since early December; the photos in the book are eye-poppingly vibrant, and several of the tropical fruits were familiar to me because of time in New Zealand. Appealing too was the bulk of the recipe, which is basically “Acquire exotic fruit, cut into interesting shapes.” As I sifted through the list of ingredients though, it became clearer that this dish represents a small and rare nexus in the cycle of globally-available produce, and getting the stars to align for this moment has taken some patience.

On the plate, we have freshly-cooked lobster meat plated alongside small planks of papaya, ovals of sapote, and rings of heart of palm, all of which have been tossed in a sweet meyer lemon vinaigrette. The bites are topped with a ribbon of passion fruit ‘jam’, then garnished with dots of tamarillo pudding, coconut ribbons and dice, lemon balm leaves, thai chili rings, pineapple powder, kiwifruit slivers, and passion fruit seeds. It tastes like being at the beach, but by that I don’t mean “of dead seaweed and Banana Boat SPF 45″; rather, it’s delightfully tropical, vibrant, buoyant and refreshing, the way you imagine being at the beach is like.

Most of the tropical fruits were straightforward enough to find at Berkeley Bowl; they tend to have kiwi, passionfruit, papaya, and coconut year-round. The hardest to find was tamarillo, followed by sapote. Tamarillo was a familiar one to me in name only; they were easy to find in New Zealand during the inverted autumn/winter months starting in April, and though I never tasted one I can still picture exactly where Moore Wilson’s stocks them in the produce section. They seem pretty difficult to find in the US; they’re grown in several South American countries but no one in the Berkeley Bowl produce dept. (which is mostly comprised of Latin Americans) had ever heard of it.

After a lot of calling around and searching online for tropical fruit distributors, I ultimately used a lifeline: our friend Lesleigh was coming to visit for a few days from New Zealand. I asked her if tamarillos were showing up in markets down there, and if so could she bring me a bag of them when she came? She said they’d just started appearing a few weeks before, and the day before she flew out she went to Moore’s and snagged 10 fresh ones and loaded them carefully into a plastic container to carry on the flight with her. I had to call US Customs to verify she could get them through on her arrival without being fined; Customs calls tamarillos “Tree Tomatoes” (which is what they’re sometimes referred to in South America), so I told her to use that term if they harassed her about it at all. She made it through with only a minor arousal of suspicion and scrutiny by the Customs guards, and once settled at our apartment she brought out the container of my 10 precious tamarillos, which might now be contenders for Most Ridiculous Acquisition so far on this project.

The taste of a tamarillo is very complex; there’s a tart, acetic quality that’s very reminiscent of a cherry or roma tomato, but also layers of ‘tropicaly-ness’, reminiscent of kiwi, passionfruit, or guava. Adding salt pulls forward the tomatoey taste, while sugar brightens up the tropical flavors. It’s pretty neato.

The fruits were surprisingly dense and very firm; they’re quite pretty egg-shaped orbs about the size of a plum, and weigh a little less per fruit than those chrome chinese meditation balls. Lesleigh and Sarah both remarked that there was something very sensual about them, which I thought was peculiar enough of a comment to compel me to try to shoot them as lustfully as one could possibly shoot fruit.

At the same time I was searching for the tamarillos, I also was trying to track down white sapote. The produce guys at Berkeley Bowl recognized ‘sapote’, but had some disagreement as to when they were in season. One said they went out of season in December, another said they come into season in April/May. I wanted to be ready to pounce as soon as I got whiff of them coming in if the latter season was true, so I started going back to Berkeley Bowl every few days to watch more-closely what was drifting in and out of season. Two days before Lesleigh showed up, so did these:

This is a white sapote; it popped up in a small batch very suddenly, and seemed extremely, perfectly ripe. I thought this signified that I’d have at least another few weeks to find them in markets, but I snagged a few right then just to taste them. They were soft, like a very ripe avocado, and the interior flesh was almost custardy in texture. The taste is mild and sweet, sort of like honey and pear.

When Lesleigh arrived, I wanted to hang out with her and her kids rather than mess around in the kitchen, so I needed to do something to hold the tamarillos. I read that they freeze well, so I vacuum-sealed them and put them in the freezer. I knew this would make them mushy, but ultimately I was going to puree them in a blender anyway so I didn’t think it would matter much.

After Lesleigh left, I went back to Berkeley Bowl…to find the white sapotes gone. I asked and was told that had been the only batch their supplier had provided, but to keep checking back as they might come back into season. At this point I was feeling a little bummed about this, and also completely perplexed by how Alinea was able to keep this dish on a menu for 3 months in the middle of winter. Tamarillo is a wintertime fruit in New Zealand (summer in the US), and sapote seems to be a springtime fruit; I don’t quite understand how this dish falls into their winter menu.

At any rate, I went back into a holding pattern, checking Berkeley Bowl every few days like some kind of little lost sapote-craving puppy. Finally one friday afternoon I saw a sign in the tropical fruit section for Sapote, and found this:

It’s a Mamey Sapote; a bit bigger than the white sapote, and not quite ripe yet. The recipe specifically calls for white sapote, so I had a few minutes of indecision. Even being fully aware of how ridiculous this internal debate was, there was still a part of me that was all “I’ve waited this long, why not continue being patient so that I can do this totally perfectly?” I decided to take a slightly different tack: I’d tasted the white sapote, which sort of made it less of a white whale in my head, so I got the mamey sapote, and also decided to buy every other tropical fruit that looked nice. I figure this dish really seems to be about capturing a moment of the year when all this produce is at its best, and Alinea certainly wouldn’t not do the dish if one ingredient weren’t available. So I’d take stock of what looked good, and also the opportunity to try as many crazy tropical fruits as I could.

Produce sourced, I had one last thing to take care of: I needed a live female Maine lobster.

The recipe doesn’t explain why I should be preferring female lobsters, but I asked for one nevertheless. Then it was home to start cooking.

My friend Katie recently recommended a pretty awesome book that was timely to this dish. The book is a collection of essays and memoirs that are wildly compelling. The eponymous essay in the book revolves around the author being hired by a magazine to attend a lobster festival in New England; the first 2/3 or so of the essay is innocuous enough, but Wallace eventually runs right off the rails as he starts wondering aloud about the morality and ethics of killing live lobsters. My friend Jess and I once tried cooking live crab, and Jess felt that the most humane way to kill the crabs was by putting them in cool water and bringing the pot up to temperature slowly, so that it just ‘fell asleep’. Wallace makes note that sea creatures breathe sea water, not tap water, so this attempt at gentle euthanasia in actuality involves drowning the creature slowly. He notes that others have claimed that because lobsters have a decentralized nervous system, they aren’t capable of feeling pain and therefore the thrusting into boiling water isn’t something they can sense. But he points out that surely-obvious are the lobsters’ sudden and obviously desperate movements when this happens, and that we could all probably agree that–at best–the lobster seems suddenly uncomfortable, right? So maybe that shoots the decentralized nervous system theory all to hell? His essay is utterly inconclusive as to what the ‘best’ way to handle this is, and rather than trying to posit a solution, he gets lost in a sea of worry and curiosity as to how people reconcile this to themselves. It’s an amazing essay in that he’s so transparent and honest about the moral conundrum this assignment has thrust upon him, and reading him thrash about is funny, tender, and compelling all at once.

So, this is where my head was at when I got to this point.

I can’t really sweeten this story up: the recipe instructed me to pour boiling water over the lobster and let it steep for several minutes, and yes, it seemed immediately uncomfortable the moment I did this. Technique and theory get thrown out the window in raw moments like this for me, and instead my head fixes firmly on what I’ve just done. It doesn’t feel very good, but I think that’s a good thing. Like Keller and his rabbits, the experience just makes me want to stay focused and do a really good job with this; I want to earn it.

After the minutes passed, I lifted the lobster out and broke it down.

I wanted to keep the natural shape of the meat as intact as possible, which involved some very tedious and careful shell-cracking to get at the claw meats. The meat comes out with some coagulated protein clinging to it, which is totally harmless but not very visually-appealing. So, after separating all the meat, I rinsed them gently in salt water until the white stuff was gone, then held them in the refrigerator while I continued working through the rest of the recipe.

I took my tamarillos from the freezer and let them thaw (mostly), then pureed them in the blender. The recipe indicates that I should have ‘tamarillo juice’ at this point, but I ended up with a very thick, extremely-aerated tamarillo paste of sorts. I’m not sure if this was a result of the freezing process, but it was very stiff, almost like a meringue.

I passed the puree through a tamis to separate out the seeds and skins…

…and ended up with something that was very fluffy and puddinglike in consistency. This gave me pause, because from here I was meant to cook this with agar, then puree it in a blender to, well, a pudding-like consistency. Did I really need to continue processing this if it already had the consistency I wanted?

I decided to hedge my bets, and split the batch in two. One half went into a squeeze bottle; I wanted to see if it held its consistency or if it collapsed. I brought the other half to a boil and mixed in sugar, salt, and agar. As it heated, the air bubbles started to collapse and the mixture took on a more liquid consistency, which made it easier to mix in the agar. I let this set, then blended it. The puree was a little chunky, which is what I usually get when I’ve used too much agar. But the taste, to me, seemed less interesting. Several of the more subtle notes had fallen out with the high heat application, and I think I liked the raw puree taste better. Or, at least to me, it tasted more pure and less overworked. I wonder if I stumbled onto something useful by accident here?

The next step was to make ‘passion fruit sheets’. I did this once before a few years back with raspberries and it worked beautifully. It’s a really neat trick: basically you make something that at room temperature is jamlike in consistency, but when cooled it gels. You freeze this gel, cut it into strips, and lay the strips over your ingredients. As the sheet warms, it drapes over the ingredients and ultimately turns back into the original jammy consistency. It looks as though you’ve somehow spooned this incredibly precise ribbon of sauce over everything.

This recipe mentions I’m to start with 40 passion fruits, which at $2.59 a pop at Berkeley Bowl seemed a little excessively expensive to me, not to mention Berkeley Bowl never seems to carry more than just a dozen or so at a time. Rather than go that route, I ordered some passion fruit puree:

The puree is meant to be heated with gelatin, then ‘spread’ on a sheet of acetate and frozen. I use the annoying quotes because even with the addition of gelatin, my mixture stayed very liquid. I realized the ratio of gelatin specified would never form a gel (usually one needs 1 sheet of gelatin to gel 100g of liquid, and this recipe uses 6 sheets to 800g puree), so I needed to do some debugging. The raspberry recipe used the same proportion of gelatin, but started with whole raspberries, which when heated form something way thicker than just liquid raspberry juice. I figured this was from pectin, and because I was using a processed puree, I had no idea how much (if any) pectin was even in this mixture I was working with.

So, I started doing some experimenting. I have three types of pectin, and only the most basic understanding of their differences. Arbitrarily, I grabbed LM pectin, which the Texture handbook tells me gels in the presence of calcium.  I have some Calcium Ascorbate (buffered vitamin C) that I figured might work for this, so I just started adding it and the pectin and whisking to see what would happen. The mixture thickened slightly but never really took on the jammy, saucelike consistency I wanted. I tried adding more gelatin, but that only ended up giving me something too ‘gelatiny’…more like a fruit- rollup than a sauce. If the mixture is too gel-like, it’s obvious that I’ve just laid a sheet of gel over everything on the plate and it’s not nearly as magical. I felt confident that the pectin was the right direction to be looking, I just needed to figure out how to make it work properly.

I realized that working with LM (and NH) pectins, which both involve the need for calcium, meant trying to solve for two variables at once. So I switched to HM pectin (or yellow pectin, it’s sometimes called). This gels in the presence of sugar, which was way easier for me to estimate. After a few more tries, I ended up with something that at room temperature was the consistency of smooth jam and when cooled set into a gel.

I took one crappy photo of a test I kept doing throughout this process…I’d freeze a bit of the mixture and then drape the frozen sheet over a spoon to see how it behaved when it warmed. You can see here a pretty obvious difference: on the left is the pectin mixture, and on the right is a mixture that had too much gelatin in it. You can kinda picture how each of these would feel in your mouth when eaten, or how they’d behave when poked at with a spoon.

Finally satisfied with my passionfruit mixture, I settled into the super-fun part: cutting a bunch of shit up. I started with a coconut, which–not matter how many times I do it–always makes me feel like a total Survivorman badass. It’s so super-fun! Here’s how do to it: we start with a young coconut, which oftentimes is wrapped tightly in plastic and has much of the near-white fibrous coconut husk still attached. This husk can be shaved off easily with a knife…I like to use my cleaver for it. Just let the contour of the hard inner coconut guide the knife. You don’t want to cut into the hard coconut yet…you just want to give him a little shave to clean him up.

You’ll eventually be able to see three seams running down the length of the coconut. Using the back of your cleaver, tap along the length of each one from one pole of the nut to the other. Be firm but don’t go nuts…you want to cause stress fractures, not bash a giant hole in it. Eventually the tapping causes natural tension in the coconut to pop the shell open. Have a bowl under your hands as you do this; as soon as it pops open, the fluid inside will stream out. Then you can use the cleaver to wedge open the coconut, and use a spoon to scoop out the flesh.

I diced some of the coconut flesh into small cubes, and cut the rest into thin ribbons.

Then, it was on to the orgy of cutting up a bunch of tropical fruits. The book doesn’t specify what kind of papaya to use, and since I’d never eaten papaya before, I bought a few varieties. This one is apparently the most common variety; green-to-yellow when ripe, with large black interior seeds.

I also found a “Thai cooking papaya”, which was larger and firmer with interesting white seeds, but the flesh was very firm and not really suited to eating raw.

These are Chirimoya; the interior flesh is very soft and can be eaten with a spoon. There’s a slightly odd funky smell just under the super-sweet smell of the fruit when ripe, but the taste is delicious.

This awesome thing is a Dragonfruit; the exterior of this particular one is a little beaten up, but it’s still ripe and the interior is in good shape (and pretty wild). The flavor of this is very mild, but the texture is neat; it’s sort of like a mealy pear mixed with sesame seeds.

This is a passionfruit; Sarah and I became addicted to these in New Zealand, where there was always a big bowl of them at work in the morning. They’re very tart and sweet, extremely candy-like. They look a little gross inside the first time you see one, but the flavor quickly overshadows that. The seeds are crispy, almost like a potato chip or like they’ve been deep-fried or something. Cut one open and just scoop out the interior with a spoon and eat it all. For this dish I needed to separate the pulp from the seeds, which would be used individually during plating.

To cut up the kiwifruit, I peeled them with a vegetable peeler, then used the natural (and very subtle) divisions in the fruit to remove very thin slivers containing single layers of seeds. You can see the striations of the fruit most-clearly at the poles.

This is my first time working with hearts of palm, but several upcoming dishes use it so I was excited to try it out here. I know that the most common way of finding hearts of palm is canned, but that’s been cooked and–from what I’ve read–isn’t the same as working with fresh. Berkeley Bowl has these in the produce section, which I imagine is sort of in-between buying fresh and canned. There’s some liquid in the package, but it doesn’t seem like it’s cooked. The hearts are crunchy and raw-tasting; not quite as crunchy as celery, more like a water chestnut. The flavor is refreshing and light and familiar to me, but articulating why eludes me. While these guys are perfectly fine in a pinch, I really want to try to source some fresh heart of palm in the future, just to compare.

When I cut into the Mamey sapote, it looked quite a bit different from the white one. It also wasn’t ripe enough to eat, so after all that I ended up not being able to use it. But the smell of this thing is incredible. It smells like nutmeg and sweet potato and allspice; it’s the craziest-smelling fruit I’ve ever, um, smelled. I had bought two, so even though I had to throw this one out after cutting into it, I waited for the other to ripen, which it did a few days later. The interior had turned a deep red-orange, similar to a yam, and the scent had intensified. It’s sweet, but not cloyingly-so relative to the other tropical fruits here. The flesh is soft like an avocado and I could eat it with a spoon. If you can find one, definitely try it!

And finally, the “That Shit Cray” award goes to this guy: a Kiwano–or Horned Melon–from New Zealand:

In a million years I would never have guessed from the outside what the inside of this thing looked like:

The interior seeds are similar to fresh pumpkin seeds, only much smaller. Each seed is encased in a gelatinous little pouch, which is filled with juice. I was so surprised by it that it took me a few minutes to even think of what I might do with it. I could probably do some interesting and fun things with the juice itself (maybe make Kiwano Puffs like the Cinnamon Puffs from a while back, or a sorbet), but everything else in this dish doesn’t stray too far from its original form, so I wanted to process it as minimally as I could. So I cut small holes in a few of the seed packets and removed the seeds, leaving a little gelatinous ‘envelope’ behind. I did this for maybe 40 or so of them, then put the rest of the seed packets into a blender and blended them on very low speed just to break open the packets and release the juice. This was strained, and I put my reserved intact seed packets into the juice to let them absorb it until time to plate.

Here’s mise en place for most of the tropical fruits…

…then “put everything on a plate and try to make it look pretty”.

The powder here is freeze-dried pineapple that I crushed in my mortar and pestle.

To play with shapes, I cut the dragonfruit into 1″-thick discs, then used a plastic drinking straw to poke out long thing cylinders. I plated several of the kiwano seed packets nearby.

Bacon is as uncomplicated to make as it is to stuff rampantly down one’s gullet: a cut of pork (usually the belly in the US, called “streaky bacon” in European countries–including New Zealand–where leaner side or back cuts are preferred) is cured or brined in a concentrated solution of salt and other flavorings. After the brining process, bacon can be sliced and cooked directly, or (as is more common in the US) smoked before slicing for further flavor. Making one’s own bacon at home is actually fairly-straighforward; it’s one of the simplest recipes noted in the Charcuterie  book.

Why not apply this process to other cuts of meat? This dish is built around exactly that: a fatty cut of fish is cured with salt and other flavorings, sliced thinly, and pan-fried to delicious crispness. The relative lightness of the protein is complimented with equally-light accompaniments: braised white beans, braised endive, radicchio, candied kumquats, orange sauce, tarragon, and juniper.

I started with the white bean puree, which meant soaking some dried great northern white beans overnight.

The next morning, I packed the beans in two vacuum bags along with juniper berries, olive oil, rosemary, and some butter. These were cooked en sous vide for several hours, until they were tender enough to smoosh with my fingers.

After cooking, I strained out the braising liquid into a container. The Alinea book doesn’t mention the need to separate out the juniper berries and rosemary sprig/leaves, which I did to help yield a perfectly smooth puree without any gritty bits (a mistake I’d made once before when making white bean puree).

The recipe instructs me to combine some of the beans with what seemed like an enormous amount of salt, and blend on high speed for 8 minutes. I find I’ve developed a small but decently-reliable gut reaction to things that don’t seem exactly right, and rather than trying to google around for cookbook errata or corrections, I tend to slow down and creep up on the thing in question…in this case, the salt and the mixing time. I’ve oversalted stuff enough times to know when an amount seems really big, so I just seasoned the puree to taste and left it at that. But I was curious about the super-long mixing time, so I pushed it a bit.

White beans, like potatoes, rice, wheat and other starchy foods, are comprised of cells filled with…well, starch. If the integrity of the cells fails, the starch leaks out; this is bad news because starch has adhesive properties (starch is quite literally the main adhesive in most paper-use glues…like wallpaper paste). If you’ve ever had gummy mashed potatoes or sticky rice, you’ve experienced this phenomenon. Overcooked potatoes (which produce too-weak cell walls, which give way easily when agitated) or potatoes whipped with a hand mixer at high speed (which ruptures the cells) often yield sticky potatoes. I was a little curious if something similar would happen with the beans, and sure enough:

The bean puree turned gummy, and in turn separated from the oil that I’d blended into the mixture, yielding something looking like a broken mayonnaise. It was also extremely glue-y. After a lot of scrubbing to clean out my blender pot, I started again, the second time being careful cut off the blending just when things seemed nice and smooth. It tasted great; junipery and herbaceous and buttery and warm.

The next few steps involved working with citrus, and because I like drinking beer, I decided to try this one:

It was interesting in that it a) had nice subtle tropical fruit notes, and b) had ‘something else’ that I’ve tasted in my homebrew beer adventures before. Either this means my homebrew beers aren’t as mediocre as I thought, or this beer is more mediocre than Mikkeller usually offers. I’m not sure which one I want to believe more.

At any rate, on to making orange sauce. I started by quartering some oranges and cooking them en sous vide for several more hours. Berkeley Bowl had a nice big batch of Cara Red oranges when I visited last week, so i decided to try them. They have a nice grapefruity-orange tart flavor and a really pretty color.

A past dish I’ve made from this book involved pureeing some oranges straight-up in a blender (without any cooking). Doing this yields a nice puree, but when I refrigerated it the rind seemed to settle and form an incredibly firm plug in my squeeze bottle–so firm I had to throw the whole thing away. I wasn’t quite sure what I did wrong, but I was nervous that I’d end up with something similar here. It turned out, though, that the cooking process causes something to happen such that the final puree stays liquid when refrigerated. The texture after blending was a little chunky, but the recipe goes on to instruct me to mix the puree with some orange juice to smooth things out.

Next I braised some belgian endive leaves in a mixture of white wine vinegar, shallot, and juniper. I did a mix of red and white endives only because I really liked the leaves of the red ones and thought they might look nice. The final braised leaves tasted amazing but were incredibly delicate; they tore easily, which made plating a little rough.

Finally,  the fish. I started with a few loin slices of Opah, a tropical fish that–in winter months–is particularly tasty due to its increased fat marbling. I found this at Berkeley Bowl, and got help form the butcher in selecting some nicely-marbled cuts. These were brined for several hours in a mixture of water, salt, honey, and juniper: our “fish bacon cure”.

The fish was then removed, rinsed, and frozen overnight until it was firm enough to slice on…TA DA! A (borrowed) meat slicer! A friend from work owns this and loaned it to me for this dish. Two slices into it, Sarah asked skeptically “So…how is it?”

“TOTALLY AWESOME I WANT ONE!”

“Great.”

Honestly, there’s no substitute. I’ve always used a knife for this kind of stuff historically, being opposed by proxy to buying my own meat slicer. But…right tool for the job and all.

The recipe directs me to slice the fish into 1/8″ slices. This is thick-sliced bacon country. I tried a few of these, and fried them in a pan with some canola oil (the fish, despite being fatty, still carries way less fat than bacon, so I needed to augment this with some oil to help the frying process along).

Honestly I didn’t really love the thickness of that slice; it didn’t curl up in a visually-interesting way, and it had enough body to sort of taste like, well, thick dry fish. I tried slicing several more portions, each progressively-smaller. The last was as thin as a slice of prosciutto. I fried all of these to compare:

The thicker slices had more body, but the thin ones were incredibly crispy. It was a funny moment for me to realize that this is sort of like the deal with real bacon: everyone’s ideal bacon slice is different. My dad’s bacon was always shatteringly crisp when he cooked it on Sunday mornings, and the way he taught me to cook it is still the way I do so. Sarah likes hers a little thicker and floppier and less crispy. In the end, I aimed for the middle ground; still crisp enough to hold its shape, but not so thin as to be more like a potato chip than a slice of meat.

While the bacon was draining, I picked a few fresh tarragon leaves, and left them in ice water for a few minutes before plating.

When I plated everything and tasted it, my first reaction was “Neat!” The fish flavor is definitely present, but not overtly-so. Smoking the fish (in the US style of bacon) would overwhelm the subtle flavors imparted by the brining process, though I bet a bit of smoked salt wouldn’t hurt anything. I used the crispy bacon slices almost like utensils, scooping up various mouthfuls of the white beans, orange sauce, cooked kumquats, and tarragon sprigs to taste together. The flavors all work really well, and while I was a little worried that this is supposedly a Winter dish and that it would taste too heavy for the first warm days of spring we’re having in the bay area, it didn’t at all. It struck that amazing middle ground that Alinea seems to effortlessly be able to hit: something that’s delicious and bursting with flavor without being heavy and filling and ‘slow’. This is bright and peppy and leaves one ready for what’s next, which is what I’m on to now…

I was remarking to Sarah this past weekend that this is stressing me out a little; it’s hard, and short of driving or calling around to every market every day or two to check on produce arrivals, I’m not sure how best to plan the remaining dishes. Because Sarah’s awesome, she surprised me the other day with something: she’d compiled all remaining recipes into a 4-page spreadsheet, broken into seasons and outlining all ingredients and equipment I’ll need from here on out. I think my next step is to cross-reference all the ingredients into another sheet with calendar months, so I know on any given day what dishes are reasonable to shop for.

We both agree that the Wild Bass dish might be my Everest.

Incidentally, I’ve also spent some time doing a similar treatment for another project that I intend to try at some point…

When I bought the French Laundry cookbook several years back, I came home and sat curled up in an oversized chair and read it straight through from cover to cover. Most of the things it contained were–at the time–not real for me. I had no idea what most ingredients were, how to pronounce the techniques Chef Keller mentions, or what any of the oddly-named dishes might taste like. Mine was largely a very blank, hollow fascination that this was something important but that I didn’t know enough at the time to understand why. There was one part of the book though that struck a very powerful chord with me: Chef Keller describes a rabbit purveyor that visits him one day and leaves him an order of live rabbits. Chef questioned the purveyor about this, and was told he basically would be required to do the butchering of the rabbits himself. He gently regales a fairly horrifying tale of trying to slaughter a struggling bunny, badly-injuring (but not killing) it, which then escapes from his grasp and starts running around the back yard area wounded and terrified. When the Chef finally chases down and dispatches the rabbit, a thick gravity settles on him: he realizes that the only way he can possibly attempt to rebalance things is by using as much sensitivity and skill in preparing the rabbit dish he originally wanted to try as he possibly could.

I still love this story; its lesson is woven into the things I find poetic about Noma and much of Alinea’s work, and it’s fun for me to look for opportunities to think like this.

A few weeks ago while at work, I took a break to walk around outside a bit. A small grove of pine trees caught my eye; the tips of all the branches were droopy and limp, making them look like something out of a Dr. Seuss storybook. I walked over to get a closer look and found the branches were sagging because they were laden with heaps of small, plump ‘baby pine needles’. When they’re in this stage, the needles are soft as a paintbrush. Several months ago I saw Ferran Adria using pine needles similar to this in “Cooking, In Progress“. I picked a few of these soft needles and tasted them; they were tart and citrusy and gently pine-y, with a very chalky, tannic aftertaste.

I immediately wanted to try making something with them. In trying to think up complimentary flavors, another thought hit me: what other ingredients could I find around work?

We’re fortunate to have a culinary team as part of our staff at work; these chefs manage a lovely cafeteria that feeds upwards of 1000 people each day for lunch. The team is led by Chef Jennifer; she and the team dedicate untold amounts of care and consideration to the food presented in our kitchens. She once mentioned her belief that it’s important to be surrounded by the values, awareness, and sensitivity that yield good food.

To that end, we have several expressions of this scattered throughout our campus, so I started roaming around to see what I could find. Our rosebushes weren’t in yet, so there weren’t any rose petals with which to play. I found several just-ripe lemons on a small tree near the entry to one of our buildings, along with lots of other herbs (mint, rosemary, some thyme). There are artichokes, but those won’t be blossoming for a while. Then I remembered Chef pointing out to me a small landscaped area between two of our buildings that are actually gardens. These gardens aren’t very big, and I’m curious how many people have noticed them as anything more than decorative, but they’re nevertheless quite beautiful and very carefully maintained. They’re not large enough to fully-support the kitchens for the entire company, though I believe the chefs do make use of them when they can.

When I walked over to our main garden area, I ran into the gardener responsible for tending the plot. She excitedly pointed out what all she had planted, giving me a little tour of the planters. There were fava beans and peas that were starting to come in (she’d harvested what she could just before I got there), dozens of varieties of leafy greens and herbs, and several varieties of edible flowers. Staggered near the center of both planters are healthy blueberry bushes that were laden with unripe blueberries, and near the end of one of the planters is a smattering of root vegetables that includes beets, radish, potatoes, and carrots.

You guys, it’s pretty awesome.

I spent the next several days taking breaks and revisiting the gardens, making lists of everything I found. At first, I didn’t note what was actually in season;I just wrote down everything that was edible on our campus. I started sketching out ideas for some dishes that featured various combinations what I’d found. One idea that jumped into my head quickly was to build something around the blueberry bushes; I had this idea of a tidy little cube of deep indigo blueberry sorbet, anchored on some kind of streusel, paired with a pine shoot and topped with tarragon leaves. I could garnish the cube with candied lemon zest powder, and dot little globules of carrot puree around the assembly. In my head, the vibrant colors of deep indigo, orange, bright green, and vibrant yellow looked cool, and I felt the flavors would work well together and be pleasantly surprising.

When I showed the sketch to Sarah though, she pointed out “Yeah, but the blueberries aren’t ripe yet, you said. Would you just use unripe blueberries?”

“Oh no, I’d just buy some blueberries at the grocery store, and say that this was inspired by what I found in our garden.”

She pursed her lips skeptically. “That’s cheating! I think it’s more interesting if you literally use what you find in the garden.”

Dammit. She was right. That would make things notably harder for sure, but also kinda fun in a Top Chef-y sort of way.

I went back to the garden and made more lists, noting this time what was ready to be harvested. Sometimes when I get an idea stuck in my head it takes a bit of effort for me to boot it out and move on to the next; I kept seeing that nice blue cube of berry and it looked so pretty in my mind’s eye, and in cycling through the available bounty from the garden I kept trying to figure out how I could shuffle something else into the position of the blueberry cube.

I was walking from the parking lot into work a few mornings later, the cold breeze brushing against my cheeks, and noticed I could smell the kitchen already awake and bustling. Specifically there was the warm, toasted smell of the woodfire oven drifting through the air. Walking into the atrium bolstered the scent, and I thought “Huh, maybe it could be cool to try to include a nod to the kitchen itself into this dish. I could include a smoky element to one of the components…”. I started flipping through my list again; I thought I remembered the gardener mentioning that there were beets in one end of the garden. Maybe I could replace the blueberry sorbet with a smoked beet sorbet? Beets pair well with lemon and carrots, and the various herbs I’d found could be used to garnish it. A sweet smoked beet sorbet sounded like a pretty crazy idea to try, and it would probably create the surprise/emotional element I needed.

The following rainy Saturday, Sarah and I came in early in the morning to do a bit of harvesting. She was armed with her camera and I with some gardening gloves and shears. The first thing I wanted to do was find the beets; they would be the main component of the dish, so were the most important for me to confirm. I rooted around a bit in a bunch of greens that looked like beetroot greens, but failed to find any beets. A little confused, I pulled out my phone and did some searching to try to identify the green leaves with red veins running through them that I’d thought were beets. They turned out to be swiss chard.

Hm.

I stood in the rain for a few minutes, trying to rethink things. Sarah asked why I couldn’t just try building a very pretty, simple salad from the abundance of leafy greens and edible flowers that were clearly ready. While I certainly could have done that, it seemed a little too easy. I started going through the garden again, trying to find something that was substantial enough of a base that it could support all the garnishes I wanted to include. The one thing I hadn’t considered up to this point was a batch of potatoes, their greens nearly-overshadowing one end of the garden.

“Do potatoes go with lemon? Can I do something interesting with potatoes?” It was hard for me to boot the ‘surprising sorbet with garnishes’ idea out of my head, and potatoes seemed boring by comparison.

“Seriously? You ever had Greek food? They pair potatoes and lemon all the time.”

Again, she was right. But it was cold, we were both shivering in the rain, and I wanted to just go home and be warm and eat some soup or something. Something like…a…hot…potato soup?

I started digging, and up came a few golf-ball sized yukon gold potatoes. Awesome. I looked around for what else I could use; the insistence on doing a sweet dish gave way in the moment to something warming and savory. Nasturtium leaves have a nice peppery taste; maybe rather than pepper in my potato soup I could incorporate the nasturtium. I grabbed some flowers from the plant too, along with bunches of arugula flowers, mustard greens and flowers, cilantro, and carrots. I also picked a few handfuls of rosemary, chervil, and tarragon, then headed up to the terrace to grab some lemons. Dripping and cold, I headed home to try to figure out how to put this all together.

I knew up front I wanted to make a carrot puree similar to what I made for the Hazelnut dish recently; I made this by slicing the carrots on a mandoline and cooking them sous vide with some carrot juice and maple syrup. I was a little weirded-out to find the centers of all the carrots were green; I worried I might have picked them prematurely, but some internetting suggested this is actually a sign of organic, natural produce; carrots with orange centers apparently have been genetically-modified to have this trait.

I pureed the cooked carrots and stored the puree in a squeeze bottle in the fridge while I moved on to making a lemon pudding. This involved steeping some lemon zest and saffron with some sugar for 20 minutes or so, then blending this with some set agar to a pudding consistency. I hit the saffron a bit hard, which helped give a nice yellow color to the pudding and also tasted awesome.

I blanched and dehydrated chervil leaves, tarragon leaves, and rosemary leaves for several hours until they were very dry and crisp. While that was happening, I blended some sour cream with the nasturtium leaves and some xanthan gum, which thickens the mixture without distracting from the flavor. Sour cream and pepper are pretty natural buddies with potatoes, and the resulting cream was earthy and peppery and slightly ‘green’ in taste. When the herbs were complete, I crushed them into fine powders using a mortar and pestle.

I started work with the potatoes by smoking some whipping cream and some butter with alder wood chips. For funsies, I also smoked a couple of oranges, the peel of which I would later use in a delicious Old Fashioned. I cut up my potatoes and cooked them in the cream and butter, then pureed the mixture and added gelatin; this cooled into a smoked potato gel.

While the potato gel was setting, I picked a few of the most tender pine boughs, picked off all the needles except the endmost ones, and very, very quickly blanched the tips. This fast blanching killed the tannic quality and left me with bright needles that taste of citrus and pine. I cut the set potato gel into cubes and speared them onto the pine sprigs, dipped them in tempura batter, and deep-fried them in canola oil for a minute or so. This caused the potato gel to melt into a hot smoked potato soup.

The deep-fried smoked potato soup cubes were plated on some small pools of nasturtium sour cream; some dots of carrot puree topped with cilantro leaves are nearby, as are small dots of lemon-saffron pudding. There are small piles of chervil, tarragon, and rosemary powder garnishing the plate, along with nasturtium petals, mustard leaves and flowers, cilantro flowers, and arugula blossoms. This was the first time I’ve made something up on my own and given a plate to Sarah to taste and evoked a reaction of “Damn, dude.” It turned out really well! The warm, comforting elements went nicely with the blast of cold, rainy weather inherent to spring in the Bay Area, but the fresh crispness of the garnishes contrasted well with them, sort of like stippled rays of sunlight peeking through clouds. I feel good about it representing a specific time and place, and hope it serves to express the reverence and sensitivity with which I regard both.

Some people get tattoos, I guess I try to make a plate of food.

I was excited enough about the final composition that I wanted to try something a little special with the photography of it. I got out my Mamiya and loaded with with some Ektar 100. Shooting with strobes has proven tricky for me in the past, given how I’m used to immediately-seeing what my lights are doing and adjusting accordingly with digital. With the Mamiya, you’ve got about 10 chances to get it right, none of which you can see until the film gets developed. I balanced my digital camera’s settings to that of the Mamiya and tried to balance the lights that way, then shot through a roll of film with the Mamiya. When the negatives were developed, I was actually surprised at how non-terrible the images were:

Some were a bit over-exposed, and one was poorly-composed, but overall things looked reasonable and the extended dynamic range and color of the film was lovely. The default low-res scans made it tough to see how well I’d done at pulling focus, so I went back and requested medium-res scans (which yield jpgs roughly-equal to the size made by an entry-level DSLR…which is to say “pretty great”). Scanning through these, I picked a few I liked, and took these back to have scanned at Fully-Awesome Super-Duper High-Res. This process costs $45 a pop at PhotoLab in Berkeley. I wanted to do this a) because I think it could be cool to try making a poster-size print of this, and 2) because I just want to see how mind-blowing a scan at that resolution really is. I haven’t gotten these scans back yet, but I’ll report back when I do.

What’s in root beer?

There are hundreds of root beer brands in the United States, and there is no standardized recipe. The primary ingredient, artificial sassafras flavoring, is complemented with other flavors, including vanilla, sarsaparilla, licorice root, anise, molasses, fennel, star anise, hops, fenugreek, allspice, nutmeg, clove, cinnamon, and ginger.

Not depicted in the video was how I started this dish, which was by making a huge batch of veal stock. Alinea’s version of veal stock is similar to that explained in The French Laundry cookbook, albeit a bit more streamlined. The basic idea is to gently simmer veal bones and some vegetables for two sessions of 8 hours each, combining the results of the two sessions, and reducing the lot to a thick, unctuous, delicious stock. This in practice takes 3 solid days’ work, especially when agitated by my insistence on doubling the recipe so that I’d have an ample surplus of the stock to last me through several upcoming dishes that require it. Just accepting the recipe’s face-value instructions to cook some bones, vegetables, and tomato paste for 8 hours fails to include the nearly two hours it takes to prepare the ingredients and bring a giant pot of water up to temperature. Indeed, the final ‘step’ is “reduce until the stock thickens”, with no mention of the full day this takes. There’s no fire-and-forget on this either; you need to be skimming the entire time the stock simmers. It is an act of extreme care, focus, sensitivity, and zen…not unlike sanding a large piece or furniture. I really, really enjoyed it. In the end it yielded me about a dozen small 250g containers of stock, which I’m keeping in my freezer until they’re called for.

Stock made, I started in on the dish proper by mixing a powdery Root Beer Cure. This contained ground sassafras, peppercorns, fennel seeds, juniper berries, star anise, vanilla, salt, and sugar. The ground sassafras might be the most exotic ingredient of the bunch; sassafras is difficult to come by (hint: look for it in holistic/medicinal herb-type stores) and is never used in modern-day root beer because of its content of safrole, which was found to be weakly-carcinogenic in rats and therefore condemned by the FDA–though the more-likely reason The Man dislikes it is because it’s a key ingredient used in the manufacture of MDMA. In reality, safrole is generally no more dangerous to humans than breathing indoor air or drinking municipal water, and the amount of safrole to be found in sassafras bark (which is what I was working with) generally has too low a yield and too high a retrieval effort to be seriously considered for anything other than perfumery applications or–if you’re a dude working your way through a pretty crazy cookbook–culinary use.

In shopping for these spices for the uncountable-th time, I became disgusted with the ridiculous prices for them in small quantities in most grocery shops, and decided to bite the bullet and order larger amounts from The Spice House, so happy have I been with previous stuff purchased from those guys. A few days after I placed my order, a handful of large bags containing very fresh and vibrant spices showed up ready for use. Two thumbs up for going this route if you rip through spices at a slightly-above-average rate.

Juniper berries

Star Anise

This is the sassafras bark I used; it smells overwhelmingly ‘root-beer-y’, but also has a much greater depth and complexity than does a sip of A&W. There’s a minty element to it, not dissimilar from eucalyptus, in addition to the earthier and more-familiar undertones of root beer it carries.

Tahitian Vanilla Bean

Black Peppercorns

Fennel Seeds

A tricky part to this dish is that most components need to be held warm after they’ve been made; the vanilla potato foam, root beer sauce, and glazed fennel all lose their vitality after a short amount of time and if they drift too far from the ‘warm water bath/oven draft’ temperature range, so once the long steps of making the stock and curing the beef short ribs were complete, it was a long day of cooking to complete everything else, working to synchronize completion times as much as possible.

Some might notice my heeding of the great advice offered in the comment sections of previous meat-related posts to try upping my sous-vide-meat-appreciation game by pre-searing the meat before bagging it; a trick that worked delightfully and yielded braised beef that was meltingly-tender and amazingly flavorful. This tip plus some other experience-derived common-sense steps to try to maximize the awesomeness of the whole dish all worked in my favor, and the final plating was one I feel very happy with. Sarah–who’s relationship with meat is waning daily and who is hairs away from being full-on vegetarian–surprised me by asserting how much she genuinely enjoyed it.

The extremely-beefy root beer-cured braised beef cubes are warm and very savory, but their manliness is tempered by the soft, airy aromatic sweetness of the vanilla potato foam. The caramelized salsify seems almost to be a play on french fries always served with a burger and root beer (Chef Achatz mentions his original inspiration for this dish came while eating at an A&W in Michigan); they’re slightly crisp on the outside but yield to soft buttery warmth inside. Garnishes of warm prune and fresh fennel fronds are lovely accents, the sweetness of the prune further balancing the weight of the beef. Favoritest Component Award for both Sarah and I goes, however, to the glazed fennel. Sarah strongly dislikes fennel (she dislikes the anethole-fueled, black licorice aspect of it), but when it’s glazed in butter its other subtle flavors come forward to be more assertively sweet.

Perhaps-anticlimactically, I didn’t get an overall impression of root beer though. Everything tasted delicious, but if I didn’t know I was meant to be looking for flavors of root beer, I’m not sure I would have found them. Even the root beer sauce that glazes the beef cubes, nearly half of which is made of the veal stock, is more ‘veal stocky’ than ‘root beery’ for me. It’s possible I over-reduced my veal stock, perhaps, and it’s uber-concentrated flavor is just too loud for the fennel and sassafras notes–that I know are in there–to be heard.

“Almost everyone has had pepperoni pizza and can remember exactly what it tastes like. While there may be variables that come with pizza’s numerous toppings, the core flavors of tomato, cheese, and garlic are nearly universal. The pepperoni merely adds a paprika and fennel seed element to the mix. We all became very excited by the prospect of turning this edible paper into a culinary joke, and Carrier sent one of the externs to the grocery store to buy some mozzarella. I began mixing powders of garlic, tomato, smoked paprika, and fennel pollen together in a ratio that tasted about right. When the extern came with the cheese I grated it into a large saute pan and fired it in a hot oven. I wanted the cheese to caramelize the way it does on the edges of the crust of a pizza that has been overladen with cheese. Once it was browned we hung the pan and collected the rendered cheese fat in a small cup. The fat was then placed in the fridge, where it set up into a butterlike consistency.”

–Chef Grant Achatz, Life, On The Line

Survey says: too cool not to try.

The “pepperoni pizza” joke is one I’d read about before; there’s even a snippet (and photo) of it in the Alinea cookbook. It hails from Chef Achatz’ days as the head chef of Trio in Evanston. As I’ve learned bits and bobs throughout the course of this project I’ve taken little guesses as to how one might make it, but last year when I read his autobiography I was stunned (and excited) that the recipe is more or less laid bare. Given my frustration with myself at tending to follow recipes verbatim first and taste things second, I really liked the obvious lack of precision that went into making something that looks so precise. “Just do stuff until it tastes good” is pretty fun.

I started with a 1-lb chunk of full-fat mozzarella. I grated this onto a sheet tray and baked it in the oven until much of the fat had rendered off the cheese and it had turned brown and bubbly and pizza-like. Draining the fat off of this is a little tricky; the cheese itself isn’t very permeable, so the oils get trapped in the cheese-bubble pockets and congeal before they have a chance to run off. I found I got a better yield by just cooking shredded mozzarella in a saute pan on a burner, periodically pouring off the oil. After a few hours in the fridge this oil set up exactly as he describes: butterlike and firm, and smelling sort of toasty and nutty.

For the dried ingredients, I turned to the Spice House; these guys have a pretty huge collection of stuff and their prices are much nicer than what I typically find in markets around here. Tomato powder, despite not being readily-found in supermarkets, is a fairly common staple. It finds use in things like emergency ration packs and disaster preparedness kits, and also serves as a base in many of the pre-mixed spice rubs one can find for meats and poultry. It has a confectioner’s sugar-like consistency and can cake easily, so I store it in the fridge. It dissolves very quickly on the tongue, and in amounts any larger than a sprinkle forms a thick, sweet tomato paste in the presence of moisture.

The note about pepperoni effectively just being fennel and paprika was surprising to me, largely because it hadn’t ever occurred to me to ask what’s in pepperoni. I flipped through the Charcuterie cookbook to find–sure enough–a recipe for “peperone”, which describes a process of curing ground beef or pork with a mixture of paprika, ground fennel, allspice, and cayenne. I ordered some fennel pollen as Chef Achatz mentioned, which I found has a powerful ‘fennely’ smell but also several other more-subtle notes as well. I’d wondered why I couldn’t just use fennel seed, but when I compared the pollen to some dried fennel seeds I had, there was no contest: the pollen was overwhelmingly aromatic and punchy.

What is fennel?

The bulb, foliage, and seeds of the fennel plant are widely used in many of the culinary traditions of the world. Fennel pollen is the most potent form of fennel, but also the most expensive. Dried fennel seed is an aromatic, anise-flavoured spice, brown or green in colour when fresh, slowly turning a dull grey as the seed ages. For cooking, green seeds are optimal. The leaves are delicately flavoured and similar in shape to those of dill. The bulb is a crisp, hardy vegetable and may be sautéed, stewed, braised, grilled, or eaten raw.

Fennel seeds are sometimes confused with those of anise, which are similar in taste and appearance, though smaller. Fennel is also used as a flavouring in some natural toothpastes.

I ordered “very fine” garlic powder, which has a flourlike consistency. I knew I’d need something that would dissolve quickly and deliver as much flavor as possible. The ‘garlic powder’ one usually finds in grocery stores is actually ‘garlic granules’, with a size closer to that of cornmeal or something; it’s better for use in cooking, when you’re offering the granules heat and time to break down.

From here I started measuring out small amounts of each of the fennel pollen, tomato, and garlic powders, along with some smoked paprika. I also blanched and dehydrated some fresh oregano until it was crisp, and crushed that into a powder in a mortar and pestle. I did the same with some salt and pepper as well.

Then I just started mixing and tasting. The tomato powder is powerfully sweet, so most of the work was trying to balance that.

After I’d gotten something that tasted pretty reasonable, I cut some small squares of “obulato”, or potato starch paper. This stuff has captured the imaginations of both Achatz and Ferran Adria in years past; it’s a thin ‘paper’ made from potato starch that dissolves in the presence of water but not oil or fat. I find it up at the Tokyo Fish Market in Berkeley, where they sell it in small pouch form. It’s meant to hold herbal home remedies (sort of a poor man’s substitute for gelatin capsules). I haven’t found it in any other form yet and it’s tough to find online, though I have seen potato starch flour in Asian groceries around here and am curious how reasonable it would be to just try making some myself.

Once I’d cut down some small postage-stamp-size pieces, I smeared the congealed cheese fat onto the paper, then sprinkled my magic pepperoni pizza powder on them.

I took one to Sarah and presented it without comment; she placed it on her tongue, studied it for a few seconds, and then exclaimed “Holy shit dude. That tastes just like pizza.” It did to me as well, or maybe more like rich marinara; I think I could have pushed the fennel a bit more, and maybe actually tried rendering some fat from some pepperoni slices. Missing are the ‘meaty’ notes, the umami you find in pepperoni, but that’s offset by the overwhelming familiarity of the other flavors; really what it’s playing on is a person’s memory of what a pepperoni pizza tastes like, and as such it’s a bit of an oversimplification. At any rate though, it was delicious and fun as hell.

Finally, I often make a modified version of some of these photos that I use as my desktop background. Here’s the one I made this week; if you click on it, it’ll take you to a full-res version of the image that you’re welcome to download if you like.  

Last week, Sarah was away visiting her sister and some friends on the east coast, leaving me with a bit of “Bachelor Time”. Excitingly, “Bachelor Time” very closely resembles “Relationship Time”, except with more meat. I ate hot dogs for most of the week (before I completely lose your respect, I’ll say I was working heavy overtime at work trying to finish some deadlines that were looming). I also got to make some extra-special messes in the kitchen THAT I DID NOT IMMEDIATELY CLEAN!

Sarah being away mostly meant I had to pick something to make from the cookbook that she wasn’t likely to be sad about missing. She’s not the biggest fan of raisins, and the title of this one hearkened images of some sort of raisin loaf in both of our heads, so I pressed forward with it over a few nights while simultaneously texting a drunk Sarah in DC. Not wanting to be left completely out in the cold on that front, I cracked open a few beers myself, and before I knew it this dish had earned the dubious honor of being completed largely under the influence. Milestone?

One of the ingredients needed for this dish is “hazelnut praline”. Some intertubez searching led me to discover this is pretty much just hazelnuts tossed in caramelized sugar. I couldn’t find any prepackaged hazelnut praline at Berkeley Bowl, so I just decided to make some myself. I started with a bag full of raw hazelnuts (or, as some people call them, “filberts”). Problem #1 with these is getting the skins off. Don’t even try to do this while they’re raw, you’ll just end up ever so sad. I…(sigh)…spread my nuts on a sheet tray and toasted them in an oven at 350F for about 20 minutes or so; just until they smelled fragrant. I am so sorry for that sentence.

After letting the toasted hazelnuts cool completely, I could grab a fistful of them and shake them around in my hands to cause the skins to flake off. This is only slightly tedious, and I was left with a nice fragrant bowl of skinless filberts to work with.

I measured out 70g of nuts and melted an equal part sugar in a small saucepan, then poured in the nuts and let the mixture cool. I pulsed the result in a food processor into a fine crumby consistency.

The praline is used in a hazelnut cake, which is made with some eggs, whole wheat and white flours, and brown sugar. This is poured into a sheet tray and baked to a spongy consistency. Then it’s cooled and ripped voraciously into little bits (no seriously).

After laboring on this back-breaking cake, I decided to get my refreshment on for the next step, which involved making a raisin gel. What better way to do this than with a beer made from raisins?! I’m always a sucker for any New Zealand beer I can get my hands on. One of my favorite beers of all time is an IPA by Epic Brewing; it’s floral and grapefruity and awesome.

BUT NOT TODAY! No, today I’d forgo the Epic for another NZ beer I found at Berkeley Bowl, by one of my other favorite breweries down there. Kiwi for raisins is “sultana” (when I first moved there, I was really thrown by the familiarly-packaged “Sultana Bran” I found in the cereal aisle), and this beer seemed a poetic choice while working with this dish.

Of course, I also needed some raisins. The Bowl had packaged bags of just the right amount of something called “Jumbo Prima Raisins”; they’re way bigger than the little Sun-Dried-style raisins I’m used to seeing. They also taste way more genuine and punchy.

I let these steep in hot water overnight to reconstitute them a bit, then blended them with a few magic white powders and poured the resulting liquid into a sheet tray I’d lubricated with some cooking oil. Once they’d set into a gel, I cut them into small flat squares and set them aside.

The ‘magic white powders’ in this case were two types of Gellan gum. Gellan is available in many ‘flavors’; at one end of the spectrum, “Low Acyl” Gellan forms thermoirreversible (unmeltable) gels that are hard and brittle in nature (in the world of gels, this means something that tears easily rather than being very elastic). At the other end of the spectrum, “High Acyl” Gellan forms thermoreversible gel that are soft and elastic. There are lots of blends of these two extremes that try to mix-and-match the best of their characteristics; Kelcogel JJ Gellan is such an example. An advantage of Gellan is that it doesn’t need to reach boiling temperatures to dissolve into a mixture, and in the case of High Acyl Gellan, the melting point is quite a bit higher than that of Agar. The gel I ended up with was soft and slightly toothy, sort of like a very delicate gummi bear.

Despite being in a bit of a raisiny-alcoholic fog (the raisin beer was pretty potent), I pressed on with making some carrot puree. I first juiced several carrots, and sliced several more into thin discs on a mandoline. I packed the discs in a vacuum bag with some honey and the carrot juice, and cooked the lot in a warm water bath until they were very tender. The cooked carrot slices were then blended with some Xanthan gum to thicken the resulting puree into a thick puddingy consistency and put in a little squeeze bottle.

Next I made what the book calls “Hazelnut Nougatine”. When I picture nougat, I think of stuff like Three Musketeers bars; Sarah recently made her own nougat for use in a Candy Bar Pie from the Momofuku Milk cookbook, and it involved cooking sugar to a caramel and folding it into fluffed egg whites (doing this requires a dazzling bit of kitchen timing acrobatics). What I made is what Wikipedia calls “brown nougat (referred to as “mandorlato” in Italy and nougatine in French)” and is basically just more hazelnut mixed with cooked sugar. The result is very crunchy, almost identical to my hazelnut praline, only with a slightly different sugar-to-nut ratio. This was again chopped up into a coarser crumby texture and set aside.

Finally, the big neat surprise: the cool yellow orb, which is spherified melted butter. I’ve done this trick several times; enough to feel like I understand it pretty well and am slightly less-dazzled buy it now. But right when I get comfy, BAM. Something neat and new to learn.

Spherifying butter presents a fundamental problem: butter is fat, fat is oily, oil and water don’t mix. So, how does one get the magic white powder vital to spherification (calcium lactate) dissolved into the butter? A while back I made Beurre Monte for a different dish, which is an amazing sort of mayonaise made just by whipping butter gradually into a tiny amount of water, effectively emulsifying the water into the butter. We use the same strategy here, but we have to do it extremely carefully I learned!

I started by picking a butter. If I’ve learned one thing from my baking experience so far, it’s that not all butters are created alike. “European-style” butters are cultured during the creation process, which results in generation of lactic acid. It gives the butters a nice slight sour note and intensifies the ‘buttery’ flavor. While cooking with cultured butter is a little hit-or-miss in terms of how much flavor you get from it, eating it spread on toast or in otherwise ‘purer’ form highlights the flavor differences nicely. For this, then, I went straight for one of the nicer ones I’m familiar with:

I brought a tiny amount of water mixed with a few grams of calcium lactate to a boil, then whisked in cubes of butter one at a time to form an emulsion. This took me several tries to get right, and it’s important to note (as I learned) that the calcium lactate–the magic ingredient that’s gonna make us up some real nice butter balls–does not dissolve in the butter. We want to basically keep the calcium lactate/water in suspension long enough for the butter to solidify, at which point we’re hoping for as uniform of a dispersal in the butter as possible. If the emulsion breaks even in the slightest, the oil in the butter rises to the top of the molds as the butter sets, which means there’s no water (and therefore no calcium lactate) on that upper surface, which means the sodium alginate bath has nothing to ‘latch onto’ to form a sphere membrane in that area. Tricky.

Once the butter has set, I carefully lowered the half-spheres into a (cold) bath of sodium alginate. I let the butter sit for 20 minutes to allow the calcium lactate and sodium alginate to form a membrane, then I flipped all the half-spheres and waited another 20 minutes. At this point, you can tell if you’ve messed up; you’ll see obvious holes in the membrane if too much oil has settled to one spot.

When I transferred the butter to a water bath to rinse them, I could see a nice membrane had formed over most of them.

Then, the magic: lower the half-spheres into a warm water bath held at 94F–warm enough to melt the butter. Surface tension causes the shape to change to that of a sphere, once the sphere is fully liquefied, I can pull them out and serve them. They look like tiny bright egg yolks; one might mistake them for quail yolks even.

Finally I was ready to plate. I bought a “Dunes” plate from Crucial Detail just before Christmas specifically because of how it works with this dish. There’s a neat sort of ‘lagoon-like’ area of the plate where the butter sphere can do. When a diner breaks the sphere, butter runs like a little river down the plate into a larger lagoon area, where it mixes with the rest of the components for easy swishing and dipping fun.

The sphere, some shards of the hazelnut cake, and some squares of raisin gel are heated under a broiler until the cake is slightly-toasted and the whole plate becomes aromatic. It’s then topped with a sprinkle of the crushed nougatine, dots of the carrot puree, and some ground cinnamon. The dish tastes more or less like (a really great version of) what I expected; the flavors are warming and autumnal, and the plate is literally warm and aromatic and yummy. I thought I would find the raisin/carrot-cake-vibe boring but it’s really very delicious. The carrot puree tastes sweet and honeylike, and I like the vibrant color it has to offer. The cake is molassesy and toasty and nutty, which is great in and of itself. But obviously drizzling everything through a river of warm melted butter only makes everything more delicious; you might as well throw a few slabs of bacon on the plate, as predictable as that is.

As I was shooting photos of this, I found the lower I got to the plate, the more it started resembling a weird martian landscape. I futzed with my lights a bit to try to allow enough room to close down my aperture and get a nice deep depth of field. I was so close this didn’t work very well, but shooting this dish and the last Bison one both gave me an itch to try to get ‘closer’ to the food, to shoot it as if I were a little guy hanging out in this giant world of food. I’d like to see if I can find ways to pursue that idea, it seems like it could be neat.

When I lived in New Zealand, I had a period where I really tried to explore the arena of selling artistic photography. I participated in an art show and had some stuff hanging in a ‘we sell edgy artsy stuff’-type store in Wellington; in both cases I didn’t do particularly awesomely. I have some theories as to why this was. For some reason photography doesn’t seem to carry with it the same gravity that painting or illustration does; people seem to assume that the camera is doing all the work and a nice photograph is just a matter of being at the right place at the right time. One panorama I painstakingly stitched together of a cool graffiti’d wall garnered lots of interested comments but ultimately never sold, I think largely because everyone thought they could just go take a similar photograph themselves and ‘blow it up’. There also seemed to be an underlying sense that postprocessing in the world of photography was somehow ‘cheating’, or otherwise distanced a piece from the realm of Fine Art (“oh, you just Photoshopped that? Huh.”)

I wonder if this is similar to what makes ‘real chefs’ bristle at the phrase “Molecular Gastronomy”? Not being a chef myself (and coming at this from what I figure is a pretty different angle than Chef Achatz did), I’ve never fully-understood why that phrase is considered to be so distasteful. Why is it bad to say a person is exploring the nuts and bolts of how cookery works? They seem to also not like the phrase “Modernist Cuisine”, which to me sounds maybe less sci-fi but still suggests what’s unarguably true: that this ‘style’ of cooking deserves to have some sort of name. I admit I can only take educated guesses as to why the distaste exists, but I can sympathize with the disagreement that the white powders are doing all the work, as I myself assumed at one point.

I say all this to note that I’m starting to gain an appreciation for nicely-executed dishes that don’t rely on the white powders so much. It’s something that just comes from practice I think, similar to my learned appreciation for my old-school Mamiya medium format film camera. The type of camera a person shoots with or the white powders a chef uses aren’t any more to either of these people than a hammer is to a fine woodworker.

That’s sort of where I ended up with this dish, which for the most part doesn’t involve any white powders (there’s one exception).  It–like the previous Lamb dish– is much more about very considered presentation than being particularly ‘sciency’. Though I still really do love what I get to learn about manipulating various foods, for these dishes I take a little break from that and just focus on the poetry of it.

The poetry here involves a very thin sliver of Bison meat wrapped around a warm candied cylinder of Fuyu persimmon. The small bite is topped with tiny dots of cranberry sauce, walnut-cream pudding, crisp puffed pearl barley, and the skin of a fresh juniper berry. The bite is served on a very hot smooth stone, which is–at the table–placed onto a fresh bough of juniper. As the meat sears on the stone, the fragrance of the juniper is released, enveloping the bite in a heady, complex vapor of minty evergreeny awesomeness.

I started by tracking down some Bison at Golden Gate Meats over in the SF Ferry Building. They also had Veal Bones, which I used to make some veal stock for an upcoming dish. The bison had been cut into sirloin steaks, which was fine for what I wanted. I was surprised and a little worried when I realized after I bought it that it was labeled “buffalo”. A quick wikipedia search in situ though told me American Bison (which is often commonly referred to as American Buffalo) are one in the same. THE MORE YOU KNOW…

I also bought a cap of beef fat (well, ‘bought’ is a strong word. I asked if they had any and the butcher just chopped me off a hunk from a nearby ribeye and gave it to me. FREE FAT!). I brought this home and rendered it down, then packed the bison in a vacuum bag with the fat and cooked it en sous vide to medium rare.

While that was cooking, I cooked some dried pearl barley in salted water until it was tender (it never got as tender as, say, risotto, despite me cooking it well longer than the recipe specified. I think I did it right though?). I let the barley dry on a few layers of paper towels, then fried it in very hot canola oil. After a few seconds in the oil, it puffs very suddenly and looks sort of like a mini Honey Smack. After draining these I tasted a few; they’re crispy and crunchy with a nice warm nutty flavor.

When I went to buy cranberries for the Cranberry Sauce bit of this, for some reason I kept thinking of–and wanting to try–strawberries. It just seemed like it would taste really nice, with the barley and other flavors, so I made a gametime switchup and bought a big punnet of strawberries. Cooking these down was extremely easy: just “cook the shit out of them”. I did this until almost no moisture remained; the strawberries become almost pastelike in consistency. I blended them and then strained them through a chinois into a perfectly smooth strawberry sauce.

The one white powder used was Agar, and that was to help make a ‘walnut pudding’. This is made from toasting some walnuts and soaking them in milk overnight, then blending the mixture with some agar, letting it set, and shearing it to a puddinglike consistency.

I forgot to take photos of my persimmons, but these were cut equatorially into round slices, which were then simmered in a mixture of sugar and water until they were tender but not falling apart. I cut small cylindrical plugs from the slices using a round cutter, and held these at room temperature until everything else was ready to go.

The last step was finding a few bushy, fragrant juniper boughs. I’m always a little thrown by being tasked with finding ingredients like this; clearly you can’t bang down to the grocery store and pick this up in the produce section. Our neighborhood, though, tends to be amazingly bountiful in this regard. I can remember first moving to the bay area and being put off by the ridiculous variety of plant life I saw everywhere…it looked like a weird mishmash of stuff with no real rhyme or reason, and I missed the homogeneity of, say, the oak woods behind our house in Kentucky, where there might be one odd walnut tree if you were lucky. But this project has given me a wild appreciation for botany, and I find I’m usually scanning streetsides trying to see how many plants I recognize. 3 years ago I wouldn’t have noticed or cared about the nasturtium, lavender, or various sages that grow on the curb in front of our apartment.

Sarah was walking around our area a few days before I made this, and I’d asked her to keep here eyes open for juniper trees. When I got home that night, she mentioned she’d seen several just a few blocks up from us. So the day I meant to complete this, I stepped out for a few minutes with some garden shears and a paper bag and scouted down some promising branches. When asking around at work what I should look for if I wanted to find a juniper tree, one coworker said “It’s easy. They smell like gin and have little berries on them.” He was totally right, though they don’t smell only of gin. The trees I found smelled of gin and a minty, piney, evergreeny sort of smell. Many of the boughs on one tree had little green berries on them; when I looked around a bit more, I saw other branches laden with deep purple berries just starting to ripen. The berries themselves are powerfully-scented; in previous dishes that have called for fresh juniper skins, I’ve always just used dried berries, thinking finding fresh berries would just be impossible. But having smooshed a few of the fresh berries on these branches (and used the skins in this dish), I can say there’s really no comparison. Dried berries have a bit of a one-note flavor, whereas the fresh ones are explosive with fresh wintery evergreen notes in addition to the gin-line taste I was familiar with.

To assemble everything, I sliced the bison meat into thin strips and wrapped them around the persimmon plugs. I trimmed the ends so the assembly would be tidy, and seared the bottom ‘seam’ to get some char on the bison and help hold it in place. At the same time, I heated our oven to 500F and placed some small stones we found on a beach in New Zealand on the rack to let them heat up. I topped the bison bite with dots of the strawberry sauce, walnut puree, a few puffed barley grains, and the skin of a fresh juniper berry. This was placed on one of the hot rocks, which I then transferred to the juniper bough.

Within a few seconds, the searing meat and the evergreen vapor hung thick in our kitchen. It smelled…like standing in our yard during winter. Like cold and comfort at the same time. The branch is more ‘evergreen’ than ‘gin’ when heated like this. The bite itself was good; the meat still lacked a bit of the punch that I expected (and mentioned in the last post), so I plated another for myself and added a few small flakes of salt and pepper. On glancing at the photo in the book more closely, I see they do this exact thing (despite not mentioning it in the recipe. I get this; some steps are so fundamental that it’s hard to remember the need to articulate them, but on the flipside it’s also easy to overlook them when they’re omitted). This brought things to life quickly; the nutty flavor of the barley and walnut and the warm spice of the persimmon were lovely; the strawberry and juniper skin added a touch of brightness that accentuated the evergreen smell of the branch. The whole thing had a transportative quality that’s become much more appealing to me in its subtlety and artfulness than my original interest in magic white powders; the best word I keep coming back to to describe it is “poetic”.