Behind the Scenes at a Lab Dinner, Part 2

This is the sec­ond install­ment in a three-part series pro­vid­ing an inside view of how the MC culi­nary team pre­pares one of its famous, 33-course VIP din­ners. The pre­vi­ous post described the hunt for the fresh­est and most inter­est­ing ingredients.

Prep as much as humanly possible

A few months ago, Anjana Shanker, a staff chef at The Cooking Lab, sug­gested that by help­ing pre­pare a lab din­ner, I could see many of the tech­niques found in Modernist Cuisine in action. That first-hand expe­ri­ence would help me answer read­ers’ questions.

“But Anjana,” I said. “I don’t know what I can do. I saw you chop those shal­lots the other day. I don’t chop my shal­lots as tiny as you do.”

“Oh no,” she said. “You wouldn’t chop things. You would peel things!”

When I arrived at the lab around noon, how­ever, all of the peel­ing had already been done. Maxime had brought in local chefs from Crush and Sur La Table to help out with details, like mak­ing sure all of the quail eggshells were the same height, and cut­ting lit­tle cir­cles out of thinly sliced beets. Seeing how these pro­fes­sional chefs we charged with what may seem like easy tasks, it’s quite rea­son­able that I was, well, not.

Mostly I tried to stay out of the way. Unfortunately, it seemed like Sam Fahey-Burke (another staff chef and, like Max and coau­thor Chris Young, an alum­nus of The Fat Duck) always needed to move to the exact spot at which I hap­pened to be stand­ing. “Judy, can you please go stand over there?” he asked more than once, although I got pretty good at doing a waltz-like dance with Johnny Zhu (step, step, slide. Step, step slide...).

The only other time I got scolded was when I was delight­ing in the cloud of fog ris­ing from a Dewar of liq­uid nitro­gen. Anjana shooed me away, point­ing at my shoes. I had come pre­pared, wear­ing ugly chef shoes, but look­ing down at them I real­ized that they were made of absorbant suede and fab­ric rather than liquid-repellent leather—not what you want to wear when work­ing with a liq­uid that is hun­dreds of degrees below zero. But I was par­tic­u­larly curi­ous to find out why Anjana was dunk­ing oys­ters in the liq­uid nitro­gen. “We’re cryoshuck­ing them,” she told me. When LN is driz­zled on their hinges, the bivalves pop open (for more on cryoshuck­ing, see page 2·458 in MC).

I was also par­tic­u­larly excited to see spher­i­fi­ca­tion, a tech­nique I had read about but have yet to mas­ter in my own kitchen. Aaron Verzosa, who is intern­ing in the research kitchen, was given the task of mak­ing dozens of teaspoon-size spheres of sour cream. He dropped a few at a time into an algi­nate bath to spher­ify and then trans­ferred them from one water bath to another. The process is pretty amaz­ing, but also time-consuming.

Some tech­niques or pieces of equip­ment, how­ever, were so “nor­mal” that it was almost shock­ing, as when some­one walked by car­ry­ing a salad spin­ner. The same was true of kitchen crises. There were no explo­sions or floods or liq­uid nitro­gen spills. Once, liq­uid in a tray in the refrig­er­a­tor leaked down into an uncov­ered tray below. Max, still mak­ing last-minute changes to the menu, deemed one dish too salty and, hav­ing no extra ingre­di­ents to rec­tify the sea­son­ing, crossed the dish off the list alto­gether. During a run-through of Nathan’s PowerPoint pre­sen­ta­tion, the pro­gram stopped work­ing on slide 84. There was a debate on whether we should put the cut­away microwave in the con­fer­ence room or in the photo stu­dio. And it fell to me to go pick up the bur­ri­tos we’d ordered for the team’s din­ner. At last, a chance for me to be helpful!

When the chefs changed into their white coats, the pace picked up. People started walk­ing faster, yet less seemed to be going on. It was like being in the eye of the storm. As much prep work had been done as humanly pos­si­ble. Little beakers were filled with Earl Grey and lemon curd pos­set. Baby root veg­eta­bles and hon shimeji mush­rooms were arranged in cov­ered dishes, wait­ing for rare beef jus to be poured over them at table­side. Sauces were kept warm on a very crowded stove, each pot han­dle labeled in black Sharpie on blue painter tape. The menus were printed off at last, and the chefs taped them to their sta­tions like gui­tarists tap­ing a song list to the stage floor before their set.

And in came the guests.

Next week: Dinner is served. And the crowd goes wild.