As our culinary team here at The Cooking Lab developed many different kinds of gels and candies for Modernist Cuisine, we tried shaping them into a variety of clever, fun, or surprising shapes. One approach we like is to use fishing-lure molds, which are sold at many sporting goods stores. For this recipe, we used earthworm molds to make gummy candies that look remarkably like real worms.
Johnny Zhu, Development Chef

I love gummy worms! I get to eat them at the baseball game. I usually get them from the candy store.
Jerry Zhu, age 3½, future Development Chef

What better time of year than Halloween to make this Modernist treat! In the recipe below, we show you how to make gummy worms at home (along with cookie crumb dirt!) and how a special helper can aid in the process.

Everyone has, at some time, been served a sauce so overthickened with starch that it turned as gluey as wallpaper paste. The flavor is usually even worse than the texture because the gluey starch inhibits flavor release, which is how the flavor chemicals get to your taste buds.

Cooks today have much better alternatives: modern hydrocolloids, which are powders that set or thicken when mixed with water. Traditional starches and gelatin are hydrocolloids, but now stores have begun to carry many other hydrocolloids that are even more useful, such as agar, carrageenan, locust bean gum, and xanthan gum.

Both agar and carrageenan are extracts made from seaweed. If you have ever played with seaweed on the beach, you’ve noted its rubbery and gel-like consistency. Agar has been used in Japanese cooking for a thousand years, but has only just become popular in Western cuisines. Carrageenan is named for a small Irish fishing village, where they have traditionally made a pudding by boiling seaweed in sweetened milk. Locust bean gum is made from the seedpods of carob, which you can find sold as a chocolate substitute in most any health food store. Perhaps the most flexible modern hydrocolloid is xanthan gum, which is made by fermenting a natural bacteria, in much the same way that vinegar and yeast are made.

These modern hydrocolloids, and others like them, have many advantages over gelatin and traditional starches. They work at a wider range of pH and temperature. They perform better when reheating. They can make gels that don’t weep. And they work at very small concentrations. When thickening with xanthan gum, for example, we typically add just 0.1-0.2 g for every 100 g of liquid, and when making a solid gel, we usually use about 0.5 g for every 100 g of liquid. The trickiest part of using these ingredients is often measuring out such small weights precisely! But because the amounts are so small, they don’t interfere with the taste of the final dish nearly as much as conventional starches do.

In this recipe for gelato, we exploit yet another advantage of hydrocolloids: the way they affect the size of the ice crystals in ice cream or sorbet as it freezes. The size of the crystals is the biggest factor in the texture and consistency of an ice cream or sorbet; generally speaking, the smaller, the better.

Finally, hydrocolloids are often called stabilizers because they help foods stabilize at a good consistency without too much added fat or sugar (we’ve assembled a useful table of emulsion stabilizers that summarizes the properties and uses of each one–you can find it below). In our pistachio gelato, the nuts themselves are the only source of fat. But to get the texture just right, a little bit of carrageenan goes a long way.

Nathan Myhrvold, coauthor of Modernist Cuisine and Modernist Cuisine at Home

Editor’s note: This is the original recipe that appeared in Modernist Cuisine. For the recipe we adapted for Modernist Cuisine at Home, click here.

One of the most important flavor-producing reactions in cooking is the Maillard reaction. In discussions of cooking, it is sometimes called “the browning reaction,” but that description is incomplete at best. Indeed, it really ought to be called “the flavor reaction,” not “the browning reaction.”

To be sure, the Maillard reaction does create pigments that lend cooked food a tasty brown hue. It all starts with amino acids and certain simple sugars. Heat and chemistry rearrange those relatively simple compounds into new molecules of rings and collections of rings. The molecules produced keep reacting in increasingly complex ways that generate literally hundreds of new compounds. Some are pigments that turn the food an appealing brown color. But beyond these are a wide array of delectable flavor and aroma compounds. It is mainly the Maillard reaction we have to thank for the potent and characteristic smells of roasting, baking, and frying.

Pressure cookers are particularly suited for promoting the high temperatures needed to accelerate both the Maillard reaction and caramelization. These two processes are frequently mistaken for each other. They do go hand in hand in many practical situations, but they involve different chemical reactions. Whether you are caramelizing the food or “Maillardizing” it, you want to raise the temperature well above the boiling point of water to get these reactions going at a good clip. In a pressure cooker, the temperature of the steam can rise well above 100 °C / 212 °F.

Adapted from the recipe for Caramelized Carrot Soup on page 3·301 of Modernist Cuisine

This past March, we had to make about 360 omelets to serve during our weeklong launch of Modernist Cuisine in New York City. We made all of them ahead of time at The Cooking Lab, in a single 19-hour day. In six of those hours, we churned out more than 300 omelet “skins.” I’ve never been as delirious as I was then…that’s a lot of omelets!

To be certain the omelets would keep well during the trip, we ran perishability tests in advance on all of the components, and we then used the test results to time our production carefully. You don’t want to be guessing when you’re carrying a whole bunch of vacuum-sealed eggs across the country! We found that the omelets and the scrambled egg foam keep pretty well for two to three days, but they really are best after no more than one day. After four or five days, the eggs start to get sticky. Nobody wants four-day-old eggs.

Needless to say, you need a lot of eggs to make 30 dozen omelets. It’s always fun to see the expressions on store clerks faces when we buy a lot of one thing: in this case, four cases of eggs at Whole Foods. That’s not unusual for us. When we prep for events, we’ll often buy 20 pounds of pig skin or all of the beef fat that the butcher trims in the morning. Restaurants typically use purveyors, who deliver large amounts of various products right to their door. When we show up at suburban supermarkets, they just never know what hit them.

Johnny Zhu, Development Chef

I still have the book of handwritten recipes that my friends and family made me when I moved to America from India. It’s funny, because I never cooked Indian food in India. I was interested in baking, but not cooking. I started cooking Indian food only after I moved to Arizona. And I would always call my mother back in India with questions. That’s also when I decided to go to culinary school.

Anjana Shanker, Development Chef

One day in a meeting, Nathan Myhrvold came up with an idea for a beef jus cooked rare. By cooking the meat sous vide at a low temperature, he reasoned, one ought to be able to create a jus that is just as tasty as traditional brown beef jus, but much brighter and more appetizing in color.

Figuring out the temperature to cook the meat was easy enough: we knew that tough beef comes out nice and rare when cooked to 53 °C / 127 °F. But it took a bit of experimenting to work out the best way to prepare the meat for the water bath. We tried grinding it, pureeing it, and cutting it to various size, but we found that when we cut the beef very finely, too much myosin came out, and the meat actually congealed into a sausage-like texture, at which point it became next to impossible to extract any juice. On the other hand, when we left the meat in large cubes, we couldn’t extract much of the jus from the center of the cubes. The optimal size seems to be cubes about 1 cm on a side.

Grant Crilly, Development Chef

We cook the meat sous vide because this method yields a bright, rare jus, which is delicious. But it occurred to us that we could apply another Modernist method–centrifuging–to refine the recipe even further. We found it works well to transfer the meat and extracted jus from the sous vide bag into centrifuge vials after the cooking is complete. (Divide the weight evenly into at least two vials, so that the rotor is balanced.) Spinning the mixture in the centrifuge for about 1 h at 27,500g enables the fat to congeal, as shown in the video below. If you don’t happen to have a centrifuge in your kitchen, a grape press, fine sieve, or even a strong kitchen towel works well, too. Press the meat and jus and shake the sieve for optimal results. While this won’t yield quite as much jus as using a centrifuge, you should be able to press out most of the jus. Even after you centrifuge, you will still want to strain away any bits of meat and fat.