Top Chef Seattle Visits Modernist Cuisine

When we found out that Top Chef would be filming season 10 in Seattle, we couldn’t let them leave town without stopping by the Modernist Cuisine lab. About midway through the season, we hosted Padma Lakshmi and the remaining contestants for a 22-course tasting to give them firsthand experience of some of the iconic dishes from Modernist Cuisine.

The 22-course meal (menu reprinted below) was prepared by our five full-time development chefs, including our previous head chef, Maxime Bilet, plus three stagiaires. The feast contained hundreds of individual components, so the team began its prep work weeks in advance. The entire dinner service lasted two and a half hours, which may sound lengthy but works out to an average duration of just six minutes and 48 seconds per course. Our original menu boasted more than 30 courses but had to be trimmed to meet time constraints.

The Top Chef production crew outnumbered the contestants by a wide margin, so we weren’t able to feed the entire crew. But, whenever possible, we sneaked samples of each dish to the crew members perched on the mezzanine above our kitchen and around the corner in our conference room, which had been annexed as “video village”, a space for the producers to watch video feeds from each camera.

Hardcore fans of Top Chef may recall that Nathan Myhrvold was a guest judge on last year’s“BBQ Pit Wars” episode. It was a pleasure to host the Top Chef team on our home turf and to give them a taste of our version of Seattle cooking.

 

SNACKS

Salt and Vinegar Pommes Soufflées

pregelatinized starch, spray-dried vinegar

Bread and Butter

centrifuged pea “butter”

Elote

freeze-dried corn, brown butter, cilantro blossoms

Steak Frites

ultrasonic fries, pressure-rendered beef mousseline

Caprese

savory constructed cream, cherries

?????

SHELLFISH

Squid Salad

crispy squid jerky, MAPP flame, Thai flavors

Spaghetti alle Vongole

Taylor’s geoduck, vacuum-molded and centrifuged broth

?????

LIQUID LOVE

Summer Vegetable Broth

centrifuged peas, pickled Meyer lemon, sheep’s milk ricotta

Rare Beef Stew

sous vide rare beef jus, garden vegetables and cured beef marrow

Caramelized Carrot Soup

pressure caramelization, carotene butter, young coconut noodles

Brassicas

Gruyère velouté, flash-pickled grapes, lots of brassicas

JUST IN CASE THE APPETITE BECKONS

Raw Quail Egg

a touch of protein from our rooftop farm

Polenta Marinara

pressure-cooked with corn juice

Mushroom Omelet

constructed egg stripes, combi oven, Porcini

Chinook King, Hazelnut, and Sorrel

aromatic nuts and seeds, lemon butter, wild greens

“Le Ski” Apple Snowball

vacuum-aerated sorbet, frozen fluid-gel powder

Roast Chicken

Mamie France‘s cream sauce, morels, vin jaune

Pastrami

72 h sous vide, Taki’s sweet onion sauerkraut, fresh Oregon wasabi

?????

FRUITS AND CREAMS

Milk Shake

goat milk, vacuum reduction

Summer Minestrone

vacuum-infused fruits and vegetables, candied white beans

Pistachio Gelato

pistachio cream, strawberries, violet and pistachio crumble

?????

SWEETS

Gummy Worms

peanut butter and jelly, fish-lure molds

Nathan Demos Microwave Recipes on Rachael Ray

Today, Rachael Ray invited Modernist Cuisine at Home author Nathan Myhrvold on her show. Using only olive oil, a little salt, and a microwave, Nathan taught Rachael how to make puffed chickpeas and kale chips. Watch the video above for the complete demonstration. To get the recipes, visit the page on RachaelRayShow.com. And for more on puffing in the microwave, watch our MDRN KTCHN video on puffy snacks.

Watch Nathan’s Modernist Cuisine Story on NOVA scienceNOW

Last night, NOVA scienceNOW aired “Can I Eat That?,” a show on the science of food and cooking, which profiled Nathan Myhrvold in the final segment. Host David Pogue narrates a behind-the-scenes look at Nathan’s inspiration for creating Modernist Cuisine and Modernist Cuisine at Home. For those of you interested in seeing The Cooking Lab’s equipment, how the cutaway photos were made, or what Nathan looked like as a kid, we think you’ll enjoy this. It is a great illustration of the story of Modernist Cuisine.

Watch Nathan’s New York Times Talk

In case you couldn’t make it in person or stream it live last Saturday, here’s your chance to watch Nathan’s New York Times Talk with Jeff Gordinier. In the video above, Nathan tells Jeff about his favorite way to decant wine, when a chef’s own two hands are the best kitchen tools, how syringes are essential to roasting the best chicken, and more. Nathan also does a mean duck-in-a-feeding-frenzy impression!

Bloomberg Pursuits

Take a tour through The Cooking Lab with Bloomberg Pursuits, tonight at 9 p.m. (EDT). Nathan Myhrvold will be taking Pursuit’s host Trish Regan through cryofrying steak with liquid nitrogen, making fries with an ultrasonic machine, centrifuging peas to separate them into three layers, and more! Watch the video above for a sneak peek.

Tune in to the Bloomberg Channel (check your cable provider for listings), or watch it live here.

Tested.com Visits The Cooking Lab

As you may recall, we first met up with the guys from Myth Busters’s tested.com at our event at The Exploratorium in San Francisco. More recently they came up to The Cooking Lab to grill us (no pun intended) on everything from vacuum-concentrated bourbon to cutaway photos.

First up, Max takes Will on a tour of the lab (above). Then, a bit hungry after the tour, Max and Will compose freeze-dried elote and pea stew.

Ready for the main course! Sam, Johnny, and Max create a lunch of cryofried steak, ultrasonic fries, and cherry salad.

Only at The Cooking Lab would we serve quail eggs for dessert. And boy is Will in for a surprise!

Meanwhile, Scott explains the magic behind our cutaway photos to Norman.

BONUS:

Scott kidnaps the Tested team and feeds them pizza!

Max Gets TESTED at the Exploratorium

Jamie Hyneman and Adam Savage of Mythbusters sent their friend Will Smith (no, not THAT Will Smith) to Maxime’s presentation at the Exploratorium last week. Watch the interview above, and check tested.com next week, when, insiders say, they’ll put hyperdecantation to the test!

Want to learn more about the Striped Mushroom Omelet? Check out our recipe and video here.

Nathan’s Decision to Leave Microsoft

Nathan Myhrvold left his postdoc research with Stephen Hawking to write software and become Microsoft’s first chief technology officer. So after 14 years on the job, what could possibly pull him away from that? Nathan tells Big Think, “It is always an issue when you’re good at something to say, do I keep getting better at that thing or do I switch to something else?” Of course, for Nathan, it wasn’t just one thing. He founded a company, excavated dinosaurs, and, lucky for us, explored the art and science of cooking. Watch the video below or read the article on bigthink.com.

Scott Visits Ireland, Talks Modernist Cuisine, Centrifuges Everything in Sight

DSC_9287
Centrifuged foods, from top-left: cauliflower, Galia melon, white onion, lettuce, celery, cucumber, pea, leek, broccoli, grapefruit, apple, carrot, plum, strawberry, tomato, blueberry, beet, eggplant, kidney bean, potato.

I recently had the pleasure of visiting Ireland for the first time to participate in EDIBLE, an exhibition on food, art, and science held at the Science Gallery in Dublin. But I had ulterior motives for my visit as well — to promote, nay, evangelize, Modernist Cuisine. Our past European press tours hadn’t had the pleasure of stopping in Ireland, so I was glad to be the first official ambassador to represent our incredible book on Irish shores.

But first, I had to transform from food geek to “food artist.” I was contacted by Cat Kramer and Zack Denfeld from the Center for Genomic Gastronomy. They were looking for exhibits to include in the EDIBLE exhibition and stumbled upon some of my work at SeattleFoodGeek.com.

In my mind, one of the most fascinating topics covered in Modernist Cuisine is the use of the centrifuge for culinary applications. For the un-indoctrinated, a centrifuge spins liquids at a very high speed, causing those liquids to experience centrifugal force. The heavier elements experience more force than the light ones, so the liquids separate into discreet layers by density. Heavy stuff at the bottom, light stuff at the top.

In Modernist Cuisine, we show you how to exploit this process to transform pureed peas into three amazing layers: pea water, pea “butter,” and pea solids. Among all of the groundbreaking techniques cataloged in the book, centrifugation is one of my favorites. Why? Because it is one of the only techniques that allows a chef to discover new ingredients.

Without a centrifuge, peas are an all-or-nothing affair. If you’re extremely patient and have the dexterity of a surgical robot, maybe you can peel the skin off a pea, but that’s about all you can do to isolate one part of the pea from the rest. However, using a centrifuge, a chef can transform one ingredient into three! It’s like alchemy, minus the extravagant costuming and shouted Latin. Even more exciting, though, is that most foods have never been tested in a centrifuge. There is literally a new frontier (the voice in my head now sounds like Patrick Stewart) of foods that we may boldly centrifuge to discover components for new preparations!

So when presented with the opportunity to explore this frontier for EDIBLE, I grabbed a juicer and a centrifuge and went to work. With the help of two culinary students in Dublin, I juiced and spun twenty different, common foods. I had a good idea of how some — like peas, grapefruit, and apple — would turn out. Others were a complete mystery, but that was all part of the process. As you can see in the picture below, there’s a lot of water in most of these foods. Some, like potato, produced fascinating strata. Others, like grapefruit and lettuce, yielded a nearly clear liquid that retained the vibrant flavor of the original food.

Of course, it wasn’t enough to spin half of a grocery aisle and hang it on the wall, I needed to show the process in action to get folks really excited about Modernist techniques. So I went on the Irish daytime show, Four Live, to explain the process and to make some pistachio gelato while I was at it.

I wish I could show you the video, but territory restrictions prevent it from playing outside of Ireland. Suffice it to say that the segment was epic, and the entire crew descended on the pistachio gelato as soon as we went to commercial.

four live framegrab
To churn the gelato in a short time, we used liquid nitrogen, an effective and TV-friendly technique for quick freezing. The show’s host was enamored with how “sciency” the technique was, and indeed it has all the visual appeal of Thomas Dolby’s “She Blinded Me with Science” music video. However, the extreme cold of the liquid nitrogen also serves an important, practical purpose: by freezing the gelato quickly, we inhibit the formation of large ice crystals that would otherwise give the finished product a gritty mouthfeel.

The best part, though, was disposing of the excess liquid nitrogen when the show was over. I emptied the 25-liter Dewar in the middle of an expansive parking lot to allow the nitrogen to evaporate back into the atmosphere. As a result, the enormous, Terminator-shattering puddle created a two-foot cloud that blew across the asphalt and into the open door of another nearby sound stage. A security guard emerged, bewildered, as if the fog were an omen of the impending rapture. It was awesome.

My visit to Ireland was very rewarding; everyone I encountered was extremely friendly and had a charming accent. The Science Gallery, enveloped by Dublin’s Trinity College, was an amazing place for scientists and artists to come together and share their work with the city. And it’s true what they say: Guinness really does taste better in Ireland.

Jimmy Kimmel, Cryofrying, and How to Make a Laser Omelet

Last night Nathan was a guest on “Jimmy Kimmel Live!,” along with actress Jessica Alba and Congressman Barney Frank. Jimmy was very excited to meet and cook with Nathan — he’s quite the food enthusiast — in fact, he already owns a set of Modernist Cuisine and has been cooking sous vide at home for some time.

The Modernist Cuisine hamburger is a great example of the philosophy we extol in the book: even the most humble dishes can be worthy of extraordinary care and attention. You’d certainly lavish great care on your duck confit, so why not do the same for your cheeseburger? In the video below, Nathan demonstrates an abbreviated version of our cryo-frying method, which involves cooking the patty sous vide, giving it a quick dunk in liquid nitrogen, and then browning the outside by deep-frying. These steps ensure that your burger is perfectly cooked from edge to edge. But let’s be honest, it’s also pretty bad-ass.

It’s challenging to work in a kitchen adjacent to a machine shop and not get inspired to occasionally tinker. So we’ve developed a “recipe” for laser etching images onto the surface of an omelet! [Perhaps we’ll include this in a future edition of MC clip_image001] First, we make the same omelet base used in our iconic Striped Omelet recipe. We omit the mushroom stripes and instead cook a perfect disk of tender egg using a combi oven. A crucial step, it turns out, is vacuum-boiling off all of the gas trapped in the egg base before we cook it; otherwise, we’d end up with air bubbles and an uneven surface. Once the omelet cools, we put it in our laser cutter, turn the power down from “kill” to “stun,” and burn the image onto the surface. Some reconstructed cheese, cubed ham, and chives round out the dish.

This video shows the laser etching process, sped up 20x actual speed. Needless to say, the parametric recipe for the laser omelet would include additional celebrity faces.

Nathan also got to meet one of his favorite celebrities, Uggie, the Jack Russell terrier from the film The Artist. Nathan showed off a section of volume 3: Animals and Plants, and Uggie was particularly inspired by our rabbit recipe. Unsurprisingly, Uggie has a strong preference for free-range hare.