In the documentary “It Might Get Loud”, Jack White says this peculiar thing about how when he’s playing at a concert, if he’s meant to move from the guitar to the piano and needs the piano to be 3 steps away from him in order to make the transition, he’ll put it further so that he has to move faster to get there in time.

I love this.

I’m not really supposed to love it. In the realm of working with technology, things are usually all about efficiency. Why do things the hard way if you can apply a bit of smarts to do them an easier (and maybe even better) way? While I dig the elegance involved in thinking like that, there’s something about White’s quote that resonates with me. Eliminating risk in the name of efficiency closes a lot of interesting doors that might otherwise be fun to explore.

This project offers no shortage of opportunity for exploration of creativity, and creativity needs an element of risk involved. Confidence buoyed by my Beef/Lamb adventure, I wanted to try cooking two dishes at once again. I could have done my usual bit of carefully setting up and photographing the intricacies of a dish in relative solitude and quiet, but rather than doing any of that I decided to push the piano bench a bit farther away and try cooking a 6-course dinner that included 2 Alinea dishes for 12 people.

Turns out I pretty much shoved the damn bench off the stage and into the alley outside, metaphorically-speaking.

A few weeks ago, in sifting through the cookbook to choose a few new Autumn dishes to work on, a couple jumped out at me: there’s a Wagyu beef dish with red peppers and pumpkin seeds, and a venison dish with celery root puree and something called “savory granola”.  Both of these involved sourcing some fairly large cuts of relatively exotic meat, so I decided to up the ante and invite a herd of friends over to share.

Admittedly I usually make these dishes in relative privacy for a few reasons. It usually takes me a few plating attempts before I get things working well enough that I’d want to show them to anyone else, take a photo of them, or serve them under what I’d consider to be ideal conditions–the bar I set for “well enough” has grown higher and higher with each dish iteration.  Because it’s always the first time through for me with each of these, planning for things to be ready at a certain time is a little hard. It’s also hard for me to justify asking all my friends to travel to our place for a few tiny bites of food that couldn’t ever really comprise a full meal, but I figured a dual-feature of wagyu and venison might kinda-sorta get me closer to being able to offer something worth coming over for.  I like to overdo things (and I wanted to absolutely make sure no one left hungry), so I decided to ratchet things up a little more and try to do a full menu’s worth of cooking. After a few days of planning, I landed on 6 things I wanted to try to make:

• At my first dinner at Alinea, they had a course similar in form to the Idiazabal dish but made with lobster bisque. I wanted to try something similar with Tomales Bay oysters, since my friends and I dig spending days at Tomales Bay eating oysters and boozing on cheap beer. The idea was to make a broth from oysters, fennel, tarragon, bay, and Coors Light, make a dough from the broth, overcook the dough, dehydrate it, then fry it to puff it into a Tomales Bay oyster chee-toe. I would garnish this with Tabasco and citrus powders to echo the flavors we tended to baseline with when gorging on oysters.
• James and I had a conversation earlier this year about what one could do with watermelon other than “cut it up and put it on a plate”. I wanted to surprise him with something highlighting watermelon, so I cribbed some ideas from the Coffee and Mandarin dishes and came up with a Watermelon capsule filled with tequila cream. This was paired with grapefruit shortbread, dried candied grapefruit zest, lemon verbena pudding, watermelon pudding, licorice syrup, dehydrated grapefruit pulp, and (no shit) Bud Light Lime Gel.
• Alinea’s autumnal “Kuroge Wagyu, Squash, Yogurt, Smoked Paprika Taffy”, featuring small cubes of wagyu-style beef topped with a red pepper taffy with embedded fried pumpkin seeds, a warm slice of acorn squash glazed with smoked paprika yogurt, webs of dried roasted red peppers and shiitake mushrooms, and dots of yogurt and red pepper paprika puddings.
• A dish adapted from the Mugaritz cookbook, featuring warm cooked pumpkin cubes paired with sweet potato and a coffee-marscapone cream.
• The second Alinea dish, “Venison, Encased in Savory Granola”, which is paired with celery root puree, cherry sauce, and toasted oat bubbles
• For dessert, Cider donuts

First, the sourcing of the meats.  When Sarah took me to The French Laundry a few months ago, one of the courses they served involved a steak from Snake River Farms. It was the most staggering bite of meat; it tasted like an entirely new animal, so unique was the flavor. The menu laid bare where they sourced their meat from, so I called up Snake River to talk with them about getting the requisite 5-lb ribeye I needed, along with some rendered wagyu beef fat. Snake River, I learned, has two beefy arms of commerce: they sell pre-packaged and pre-portioned cuts to consumers like your humble narrator, and also sell wholesale to restaurants. They were happy to work with me on searching for a 5-lb ribeye (their site notes only 7-lb ones) — which saved me $50 on the beef — but couldn’t help with wagyu fat, as that’s something they only provide through their wholesale component. No biggie, rendering my own beef fat is easy enough. The beef itself showed up the next day complete with its own instruction manual, a very polished, high-detail description of managing temperatures for my precious hunk of wagyu. The first thought that went through my head as I scanned it was Tracy Jordan on 30 Rock saying “I’m not doing ANY of this, Liz Lemon!”

I also needed to source venison, and in doing so learned the following: you can’t buy wild venison because the FDA can’t certify the health of the animal or its diet, which means one has to farm venison to sell it in retail shops. Farming venison takes a shit ton of space, because deer like to run and jump and frolic, and this takes giant fences and lots of space to keep them happy. In America we love our beef, so it’s way more profitable to use that land for raising cattle. New Zealand provides 85% of America’s legal venison product. The Alinea book mentions nothing about where they source their venison, but I checked the French Laundry book and they note D’artagnan, which resells imported New Zealand venison at what I’ll politely call “a premium”. Eleven Madison Park mentions in their cookbook that they source from “Millbrook Venison Products”. I wasn’t sure what to make of the New Zealand thing; I figured it must be frozen for such a long trip, and I wonder if people use it because it’s the best they can get, not because it’s the Best (but honestly I have no idea; the assumption that it’s frozen in transit is a blind one). My gut tells me if I can find fresh, non-frozen venison, that might be the Most Awesome, so I called Millbrook Venison to see if they could overnight me a half saddle.

The very nice guy at the other end of the line said he could do it but that I’d be a little crazy to let him, because the shipping on it would be incredibly expensive. More expensive than imported New Zealand venison? Would it be worth it to get it unfrozen? I had no idea. The guy at Millbrook said he ships to a few restaurants in the bay area, including La Folie, and suggested I call them to ask if I could buy a half saddle from them and skip paying shipping. This sounded like a bit of a nutty idea, but I tried anyway; I phoned La Folie and left a message asking them about it, but they’re snooty and french and never called me back.

After a bit of asking around, a friend at work mentioned I should call Golden Gate Meats over in the Ferry Building (I’m not offering the link to their site because they have a terrible song playing in the background of the page and I’m just not going to do that to you, friends). The butcher I spoke with was awesome and very helpful, and offered to order me a loin and a tenderloin for arrival the next day. When I went to pick it up, sure enough they had set it aside with my name on it, which admittedly felt a little awesome. I asked the butcher where the meat was from (I assumed New Zealand); he mentioned it was actually from an elk farm outside Denver in Colorado, but that what happens is the farm probably sells their deer to a larger slaughterhouse for processing before it’s shipped to GG Meats. This is actually exactly how the cattle farm I grew up on works: Dad would take young cattle who were of prime age for beef up to an auction house to sell them off to bidding slaughterhouses, who would then take the cattle, process them, and sell the product to grocery stores or butcher shops around the state.

Meats sourced, I went grocery shopping Friday night after work, then came home and started cooking. This continued almost solidly through the next two days right up until meal time at 6pm Sunday. It turns out that this was almost exactly my maximum capacity as an individual, and even then I needed to tap in help at a few key moments. Mike and Kate generously offered to bring dinner over Saturday (suspecting I wouldn’t have time to make it myself…they were right), then hung around the next day helping me work on everything in between cheering for the Patriots.

The Oyster Cracker idea I had failed at the last minute; the crackers failed to puff, so I had to take them off the menu. I think the idea is sound and could work well, I just need to figure out how to make the cracker dough more glutenous so it traps water and is a little stretchier. Everything else went more or less smoothly, though I was working right up to when people arrived. This had a couple of not-great ramifications: 1) I couldn’t set up my photo gear and take chic photos of everything per usual, and 2) I didn’t have an opportunity to plate things before serving them for the first time. Foreshadowing, friends.

Erik showed up a few hours early to help out; this turned out to be one of the most key moves of the weekend. I mentioned a few posts back that he’s been exploring fancy cooking in his free time as well, though he both of us have generally spent most of our time on our own trying to figure things out for ourselves. He came over Sunday afternoon ready to contribute in a few ways I didn’t even expect but deeply appreciate, including bringing over his sharpening stone and sharpening my knives before service…this was just awesome.

Apologies for the second movie reference of the day, but in the cheesy-but-still-kinda-cool movie “Limitless”, the main character takes a pill that causes his brain to operate at a higher capacity than it normally does; in the scenes were he starts ‘tripping’ on this drug, there’s a neat audio trick the sound guys do where they intersplice whirring warming-up jet engine turbines with the film’s score to highlight him becoming more aware of his surroundings and starting to process more and more information at once. As douchey as this might sound, it’s a little bit how it feels to go from a relatively calm, quiet kitchen to one teeming with guests and the sudden motivation to care for them. There’s a bit of an electric crackle of energy that’s absent when I’m working quietly and very slowly near the end of a dish when I’m carefully plating it and taking photos of it.

As it turns out, this is also where things can start going wrong (or, to be less self-critical, “differently than I would have liked”). I’m suddenly aware of things like simultaneous plate serving temperatures of everything, consistency in portion size, etc. Doing this stuff precisely once or twice alone is a good thing before expecting to be able to do it in front of a dozen people. As it stood, I was figuring it all out as I was going, and got it wrong almost every time.

Thankfully I have some pretty great friends who are both blind to the nuances I get really fussed up over and also extremely eager to help when I get a little overwhelmed. Unwrapping and plating all the watermelon-tequila capsules was something that wouldn’t have worked very well if I was doing them one at a time, but with 3 other people it was done in seconds.

Side note about the watermelon capsules; I had this idea to try to dehydrate watermelon pulp, powder it, and mix it with pop rocks as a component of this dish. Mike and Kate suggested trying something more exotic, like savory pop rocks. I thought this was a pretty rad idea, and after some talk we landed on cilantro. As neat as it sounded at the time, on the plate I wasn’t sure it worked so well; everyone could agree they were interesting but probably didn’t fit well with the rest of the flavors.

While nothing looked as perfectly pretty as I would have liked, one dish in particular was visually just terrible. The Pumpkin/Sweet Potato/Coffee dish should be served warm, so I plated pumpkin and sweet potato then put the plates in a warm oven. I’d cured the pumpkin in syrup after cooking them until they were tender, and the sweet potato was cooked with vanilla and sugar. The sweet potato I bought had turned out to be an odd green inside (I can’t recall the variety…it tasted great, but looked like salsa verde or something). When the warm plates came out of the oven and I tried smearing coffee marscapone on the plate, the cheese melted immediately…it looked like a sad sloppy blob of melting chocolate ice cream. There was no salvaging this at all really…it looked terrible to me and I almost wanted to scrap it, but then figured it might be a pretty funny example of missing the proverbial piano bench entirely. Several people have mentioned being curious about what it looks like when things go horribly wrong on this project…this is a pretty good example of it. I served it anyway, and it tasted nice, but man, it was ugly as hell.

The biggest production was dealing with the Venison Encased in Granola; I didn’t have 12 same-sized ring molds, so I just had to improvise with the sets I had and try to figure out how to dole out the portions properly. Plating this thing was pretty intense, but Erik and James helped get it all done.

The one thing I had done before (and unsurprisingly, the thing that went the most smoothly) was making cider donuts, served with warm cider icing and cider-mace syrup.

There were things that disappointed me about this whole thing, each of which revolve around the discrepancy between my taste and my ability. Nothing looked nearly as tidy and pretty to me as I would have liked, there were things wrong/broken with every dish (the red pepper taffy in the Wagyu dish was a mess) that I didn’t have time to remake, and I have no fancy photos to show of anything (I didn’t actually touch a camera at all — these photos are all courtesy Sarah). But I still walk away from the experiment feeling happy and satisfied: I learned a lot about a lot about my limits, how much risk can be involved before it overwhelms things, and how much room is needed for creativity. And I think most things tasted nice for everyone, and we didn’t need to order a pizza. The most fun moments for me were the most stressful, but also the ones where I was getting the most help from friends, and it felt neat to acutely become aware of a helping hand giving me room to think. I have a deeper appreciation for what’s involved with things for people like David or others doing more professional dinner adventures, and realize I’m nowhere close to being able to hang with that caliber of chef…yet.

Maybe the nicest moment I’ve had was this morning when I was walking in to work and was thinking about what I wanted to say here. There were piles of autumn leaves everywhere and I remembered that I’d really wanted to do the Alinea thing where I covered my dining table with leaves or lined our entryway with fresh hay and pumpkins, but just didn’t have the time to do it by myself. But rather than being mad at myself for all the stuff that didn’t go right I just thought “Oh yeah that’ll be cool as shit next time I try this”, and undoubtedly everything will be just a little bit better.

Baby steps.

 

Whole lotta stuff happening all at once here lately; we’re two weeks away from wrapping work on the project I’m on at work currently so the hours are a little intense. I’m working specifically as an Effects Artist on this project, which generally involves making a lot of ‘natural phenomenon’-type things like fire, water, rain, mist, etc. Sarah and I are also gearing up to visit New Zealand soon; it’s been two years since we left and this will be our first trip back. We’re both extremely excited and also admittedly a little nervous — I think we’ve tried our best to make peace with leaving the place we love so very much, but I anticipate having some ‘feelings’ when we get back down there. In between the work hours I’ve been trying to align the stars for another couple of dishes over the coming days that I hope to complete before taking a break to travel. And, last week I got an interesting email that’s added something new to this dish here.

My friend Josh recently left work here to go to Lytro. Lytro makes a peculiar little camera that ‘captures light fields’. Josh explained this to me briefly: there’s a very thin array of multiple tiny lenses covering the camera’s sensor that allows the camera to capture intensity and directional information about the incoming light. This information allows Lytro to computationally reconstruct an image at various focus points after it’s been captured…effectively allowing users to refocus an image after it’s been taken. Their current application of this is allowing people to share these photos; Lytro calls them “Living Photos”, and viewers can click around the image to refocus it as they like (and, ugh, apologies if you see a big blank space below: try refreshing the page. I keep having trouble actually getting these Lytro images to show up properly and am not sure why):

When I heard about this camera and first saw this Living Photo thing, I admittedly felt a little skeptical. I like regarding the photographic medium as a way of telling a story; controlling focus is often a pretty vital tool in telling that story. Allowing users to refocus however they like takes a degree of control away from a photographer. Plus, frankly, I found the actual presentation of the photos a little gimmicky. I thought the idea of a refocusable image might have merit, but the end way they were presenting their product seemed to be targeting an audience I didn’t really understand.

ANYWAY. Josh and I traded some emails last week that eventually meandered around to the suggestion of trying to use one of these to photograph some food. At this point the potential of the camera settled on me: Alinea dishes are inherently exploratory, so a medium that allows viewers to explore things could work really well here. It’s very often that I shoot a dish from the same angle using multiple focus points, and I usually choose one more or less arbitrarily, regretting that people can’t see the food as I’m seeing it (and of course posting multiple photos from the same angle is lame and boring). I’m interested in getting the camera situated ‘inside’ the dish, as if we’re viewing it as a landscape or as architecture, but doing this runs into limitations with macro photography…plus my camera is big and difficult to get super-close to things. The Lytro camera has a much smaller form factor than my camera, so I could get it closer to the food, and the refocusable aspect of the final images (I hoped) meant others could get a little more involved in exploring the dishes.

The idea seemed like it could be cool, so Josh loaned me his Lytro to play with. Funky camera in hand, I started in to working on this dish. The centerpiece of this thing is a capsule made of coffee that’s filled with a mint cream. It’s complimented by a serving of buckwheat ice cream. Holding both frozen items in place are small chunks of coffee cake and crumbs of a buckwheat streusel, and alongside both are dots of coffee pudding, passionfruit pudding, and mint gel. A few shards of dehydrated passionfruit curd are scattered about, along with two hershey-kiss-shaped peppermint puffs. The entire dish is garnished with tiny mint leaves.

There are a couple “do this overnight”-type steps in this one, so I dug into those first.  I made a passionfruit curd from passionfruit juice, sugar, glucose, and butter. Passionfruits in and of themselves aren’t terribly ‘juicy’ (more ‘pulpy’), so I bought some passionfruit juice before noticing that it’s actually passionfruit pulp mixed with pear juice. The juice tastes nice and decidedly passionfruity, but not quite as punchy as a real passionfruit. I tried artificially boosting up the impression of passionfruit flavor by adding a bit of citric acid, which was mildly successful but still left me wondering if there’s a more-passionfruity juice I should have hunted for. At any rate, the curd is left to firm in the fridge, then smeared onto a dehydrator tray and left to dehydrate for 24 hours.

The first time I did this, I apparently smeared the curd too thick, because after 24 hours I ended up with something that worked like this:

Bleh. It took me a second try — spreading the curd much thinner — before the curd dried into something like a crispy potato chip and I got it to work like this:

Heads-up that if you live in a moist, humid environment (like, say, the Bay Area this past week) and are working in a warm kitchen this stuff stays dry and crispy for about a minute before turning into a gummy sticky mess. Stay sharp, chefs.

The other longer step was making the peppermint puffs, and these were extremely peculiar. I’ve made puffs before, but these were much more of a production in terms of mucking around with temperatures. The gist is that I steeped some mint leaves in hot water to make a strong mint ‘tea’, mixed in some Methocel F50 and cooled the mixture in the fridge for several hours, heated it to 140F on the stove, then cooled it again overnight. I’m not quite sure what the heating step accomplished; this step wasn’t required when making the Cinnamon Puffs. After chilling the second time, the mint liquid is combined with sugars and mint extract and whipped until it forms something resembling a fluffy meringue, then dolloped onto dehydrator trays and dehydrated for about 12 hours until they’re light and crispy.

As the curd and puffs were dehydrating, I worked on making several puddings and gels: coffee pudding, passionfruit pudding, and mint gel. The coffee pudding recipe provided by the book involves a mixture of coffee and milk; this resulting pudding will eventually become the basis for the coffee capsules. But the plating instructions mention using some of the pudding as dots on the plate itself. The coffee dots pictured in the book don’t seem to have cream in them (they’re almost black, whereas the recipe’s coffee pudding is — as you’d imagine — milky brown). So I made a second batch of coffee pudding sans cream to garnish the plate. I don’t have an espresso machine, but rather a shitty italian stovetop percolator that works fine but can’t brew thick espresso quite properly, so my coffee pudding didn’t turn out as jet black as what’s in the book.

For the passionfruit pudding I again used the pear-passionfruit juice, and again tried to kick it up a little with some citric acid. The book has a LOT of recipes for puddings, most of which involve setting a liquid with agar then blending the resulting gel. Anything that deviates from this is interesting to me at this point; the passionfruit pudding called for adding a bit of xanthan at the end to the gel, which I hadn’t seen before. The recipe is rather small — anything less than about a cup of gel doesn’t work in my blender very well — so I tried blending the gel with an immersion blender before adding in the xanthan. What I ended up with was a little odd: the gel had a ‘snotty’ textural note to it, and I think the use of my immersion blender whipped in a lot more air bubbles than I normally see. The pudding was nearly a foam, and had a peculiar foamy quality to it when I tasted it. The passionfruit flavor was muted to begin with, and the added air and interesting texture ended up dulling the flavor release even more. It looked kind of neat, but I ultimately decided to try making it again in a larger batch and without the xanthan. This yielded something that looked much more familiar to me and tasted a lot crisper. It also hinted to me that whatever passionfruit juice Alinea uses probably has more acid and flavor than what I had ahold of. You can see the difference here; the foreground dot is the over-aerated batch, while if you focus on the background one you can see far fewer bubbles, a deeper color and a smoother texture. For the final plating I actually used dots of both just for variation.

To make mint gel, I mixed sugar, glucose, and water with some gellan gum to yield a gel. The book says to use High-Acyl gellan, which yields a soft, elastic gel, but then directs me to “slice the gel into shards with a knife”. I think we actually want to use Low-Acyl gellan, which yields hard, brittle, agar-like gels that break apart and resemble shards much more readily, but I kind of liked  the softness of the high-acyl version so I didn’t bother to fix it. The mint flavor comes from use of peppermint oil; this stuff is hella powerful and a few tiny drops are enough to flavor most anything, but the recipe calls for a full gram of the stuff. Heating this with the sugar was a little like working with the horseradish cream last time; it was super minty, and made my eyes water as the vapor hit them. Joe once told me about these crazy Japanese things called “Eye Mints“; I was reminded of them here. It felt like someone poured mouthwash on my face.

Gels sorted, I worked on a few baked goods next. I made a coffee cake flavored with Trablit coffee extract and cream. Once this had set into a nice spongy texture and cooled, I ripped it into small chunks for plating.

I also made a buckwheat streusel. This one was a little perplexing for me; it’s basically several flours (buckwheat, all-purpose, and almond) mixed with sugar and chunks of butter. The butter is meant to be ‘loosely incorporated’, so what I ended up with before baking was just a bowl of very dry ‘dough’ (more like…flour with chunks of butter):

After baking for 20 minutes or so, the butter had started to melt into little wet spots, but hadn’t quite permeated the full volume of the flour. So, I stirred it up a little and pressed it to redistribute, and continued baking until it looked like this:

I have no idea if this is right.  I asked Sarah about it and she said “You’re just going to crumble this up right? So…does it taste good?” Admittedly it did taste nice, but I couldn’t quite understand what I’d really done other than melt some butter into some flour. So, I went with it, but if anyone cares to opine about the nuances of streudeling I’d love to hear it.

To make buckwheat ice cream, I toasted some buckwheat groats until they were aromatic (having never smelled toasted buckwheat groats…they have a pretty distinctive, earthy/nutty smell that oddly [and perhaps appropriately] reminds me of autumn), then let these steep in milk to infuse it with their flavor. I then simmered the milk with some sugar and Stabi-Sorbet, spun it in an ice cream churn, and left it in the freezer to firm up. I’m meant to quenelle this ice cream for plating, but I just can’t seem to get the hang of this. My ice creams either turn out too firm or — as they soften — too ‘sticky’ to work properly. I’ve tried the two-spoon method with limited success (I have way more success screwing it up and swearing loudly), and definitely can’t get it going with one spoon. I can’t figure out if I should scrap this stabilizer and try a new one (the recipe actually calls for Cremodan 64), adjust the temperature of my freezer to be a bit warmer, or find some sort of “quenelling for food nerds” class around here or something, but I just can’t seem to get it right.

The last thing I worked on was making the mint cream filling for the interior of the coffee capsules. The recipe specifies use of “Get31″ creme de menthe, a french mint liqueur that’s pretty tricky to find in the US. I worked with Ledger’s Liquors in Berkeley for a few weeks trying to track down a bottle, but ultimately got a little impatient and at the recommendation of the owner tried a different creme de menthe by Tempus Fugit. Beautiful labeling aside, this liqueur is delicious. It has a clean icy mint flavor that’s not overpowering and also has some nice subtlety to it. Mint takes on a level of complexity when it’s cooked, and I recognized some of those flavors in here (which reassured me the flavor wasn’t wholly artificial). The liqueur is mixed with cream, sugar, and propylene glycol alginate, a stabilizer that adds body and thickness to the mixture when it’s frozen (the alcohol prevents the mixture from freezing, but use of the stabilizer causes it to take on a thickness it wouldn’t otherwise…it sorts turns out to be the consistency of the little tub of icing you get with Pillsbury Cinnamon Rolls).

My final step was building the coffee capsules themselves. Using the coffee-and-cream pudding I made earlier, I spread the mixture onto some squares of acetate and rolled them into tubes, just as I’d done with the Mandarin capsules from a while back. After freezing the tubes for a while, I first put on one cap of coffee pudding, froze the capsules again, then filled them with the mint cream, capped the other ends, and froze them one last time to complete.

I found the flavors of this dish lovely but ever-so-slightly disparate; the mint and passionfruit went together well, but the passionfruit and coffee failed to fully integrate themselves for me. I feel like the choice of coffee one uses is kind of a big deal; I used a dark espresso roast from Peet’s largely because that’s what we had in the fridge, but it wasn’t quite inky enough in flavor to match the tang of the passionfruit, and I kinda wished I’d just gone to a coffee shop and ordered the 5-6 espressos I’d need to make the puddings. They were tasty enough, just not 100% awesome for me. And I mentioned the passionfruit curd and puddings were a tick or two milder than I would have liked…in general I wish some of the flavors would have been more assertive, but that’s my fault, not the recipe’s. The mint flavors, aided with a lavish use of peppermint oil, came through loud and clear though, and the buckwheat flavor (while also not all-the-way integrated for me) was also very crisp and clear. James’ comment was “It’s not quite a dessert”, which I think might be true…it’s less sweet and decadent than some of the later desserts in Alinea’s menu, so I think this one might be one of the transitional dishes into the dessert courses.

As for the Lytro camera itself, I have mixed feelings about my experience. As it stands, the camera lacks some features that I rely on heavily for this project. I use infrared-triggered flashes to light things…this lets me control the color and intensity of the lighting in each shot. The Lytro camera has no way to fire flashes, so my entire lighting setup was voided with it. It’s possible to fall back to lights that don’t flash (these stay on all the time, and are called “hot lights”…because they get really freaking hot), but I don’t own any. Not wanting to buy an entirely new light setup for the sake of trying this camera notwithstanding, hot lights pose a pretty severe problem for delicate food photography (like, say, a plate of frozen food) for obvious reasons. I do have a halogen work lamp that I tried using, but it too gets super hot and is very yellow, so it wasn’t great to work with. You can sort of see here the coffee capsule starting to collapse from the heat in the background:

Another difficulty is a lack of postprocessing tools for Lytro images. Every image I share here is postprocessed to some degree; usually I’m sweetening colors, balancing exposure, and in some cases removing distracting artifacts like dust or odd reflections. White Balance (the ability to tell the camera/developing software how to represent ‘white’) is absent; this means the camera tries to guess how it should best represent colors, often guessing differently than I would like. As an example, here’s an unbalanced photo taken with my regular camera using just the overhead lighting in our house at night (tungsten bulbs):

Here’s the same image using my lights (but not digitally altered):

And here’s the same image with some basic digital development done; I’ve cropped it a bit to straighten it, and sweetened some of the greens and orange/yellows that my camera fails to register properly on its own:

This honing of things is an important part of this process to me, and not being able to do it at all with the Lytro images is tricky.

The form factor of the camera has some appeal though, and Lytro built an onboard processor into the camera that allows them to push out upgrades to both the camera and its software online…this is pretty neat and means they could potentially push out a software update in the future that would allow me to develop the photos as I would like. And I feel like there’s some fundamental appeal to being able to explore this particular subject. I might continue to play with it a bit more, backed up by use of my regular camera.