Modernist Cuisine and Modernist Pantry Partner for Online Store and Cooking Kits

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Finding Modernist ingredients and tools just got easier. The Modernist Cuisine™ Online Store, powered by Modernist Pantry, provides a wide selection of unusual ingredients, packaged and priced for both home and professional use.

Since the release of Modernist Cuisine, our readers have frequently asked us for help locating ingredients and equipment. While some Modernist ingredients are sold at grocery, health, brewing, and other specialty stores, the shopping experience can be frustrating—ingredients are commonly labeled with different names, and the properties of some ingredients vary widely between brands. In response, we have partnered with Modernist Pantry, an online retailer dedicated to Modernist cooking, to streamline the shopping process. Ingredients are easy to find, and the descriptions provide contextual links to our Modernist Cuisine books.

If you are new to Modernist cooking and want to experiment with some of the most iconic Modernist techniques, we have you covered. The Modernist Cuisine™ Gel Noodle Kit and the Modernist Cuisine™ Spherification Kit include all of the tools and Modernist ingredients needed to learn the techniques of gelling. Each kit also includes a full-color recipe booklet with all the features you have come to expect from Modernist Cuisine: recipes with scaling percentages, step-by-step photos, recipe variations, troubleshooting steps, and detailed information about each ingredient. Each kit contains enough Modernist ingredients to make 20 batches.

Although we think a tank of liquid nitrogen would make a great stocking stuffer, these gelling kits are a little easier to gift wrap. Designed for ages eight and older, they are also great projects to tackle with your kids!

We encourage you to share your creations and variations with us on Facebook and Twitter. You can learn more and buy the gel noodle kit here or the spherification kit here.

– The Modernist Cuisine Team

Revisiting a Halloween favorite: Glowing gummy worms

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By: W. WAYT GIBBS

When I was 10 years old, I took a bet from a fellow sixth grader and, in front of the whole class, choked down a panfried earthworm. Of all the weird foods I’ve eaten—and there have been quite a few—that was by far the creepiest.

With a little advance planning, you can make a treat for this Halloween that gives your guests the willies but actually tastes great. Imagine their reaction when you uncover a serving tray piled high with cookie-crumb “dirt” filled with wiggling gummy night crawlers. Then turn out the light, switch on a black light, and enjoy the gasps as the edible worms emit an eerie blue glow, thanks to a tasty fluorescent liquid that you might already have in your pantry.

These treats are fairly easy to make once you have all the needed supplies. And kids will enjoy helping with the preparation, if you don’t mind spoiling the surprise. To make worm-shaped gummy candies, our research chefs use night crawler fishing-lure molds purchased from a sporting goods store. But other mold shapes will work as well; this time of year, it’s easy to find candy molds for skulls, spiders, rats, eyeballs—whatever sends a shiver down your spine. Shallow molds work best.

Two special ingredients combine to yield that smooth, stretchy, yet tender texture you want in a gummy candy. The first is gelatin, which comes in various strengths measured by a unit called Bloom (after Oscar Bloom, who invented the gelometer, a device that measures jelly strength). The recipe works best with 200 Bloom gelatin, sometimes called gold gelatin. If you can’t find it, you can substitute Knox-brand powdered gelatin, which has a Bloom strength of 225. Just reduce the amount used from 20 grams to 18 grams.

The second unusual ingredient is gum arabic, which is made from the hardened sap of acacia trees. The gum gives the candies a smooth, shiny surface while remaining pliable. It’s fairly pricey stuff, but you only need a little bit. Look for it online in powdered form.

And that secret ingredient that glows under black light? Quinine, which is used to flavor tonic water. This medicinal chemical, originally isolated from the bark of a South American tree, is so highly fluorescent that it sends out about 55 photons of visible blue light for every 100 photons of ultraviolet light (also known as black light) that it absorbs. If you don’t already have a black light, get the kind that uses fluorescent tubes: they emit a wider range of wavelengths than LED lights do and will make the quinine in the candies glow more vibrantly.

To obtain the right texture for these candies, it is crucial to use the correct proportions of ingredients.

Glowing Gummy Worms Recipe

Inside The Lab with the Modernist Cuisine Kitchen Team: Trials and Variables

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In Parts One and Two of this three-part series, I described the processes by which we developed the recipes and captured the images for Modernist Cuisine. In this final post, I will explain how one of the most tedious aspects of our job turned out to be among the most useful.

With most cookbooks, a chef must usually spend a lot of time deciphering a particular recipe in order to break down its components to the essentials. Modernist Cuisine is different in that we furnish the chef with parametric recipes and tables that provide the crucial components of a dish, and then we offer some suggested variables.

For example, a typical sausage recipe will contain meat, fat, binders, and spices calculated to specific measurements. In contrast, Modernist Cuisine provides a table that shows a ratio of meat to fat to binder, plus any other components, for different styles of sausage. Providing a ratio allows the chef to introduce his or her own preferences and tastes to create their own distinctive dish without having to reverse-engineer it from a static recipe.

These tables require a large, sometimes exhaustive, amount of data. For example, just to fill out the additives portion of the sausage table, we set up and tasted 56 variations of additives, binders, and emulsifiers, all in at least three different concentrations! For the 14 temperature grades in our egg chart, we tested the entire range of 55-80 °C / 130-176 °F, degree by individual degree. The sheer number of variables became mind-numbing at times, but the utility of this raw data is invaluable.

The hot fruit and vegetable gels table.

This series has encompassed in a nutshell what the kitchen team behind Modernist Cuisine does all day. While our work can be wearing, we think it is definitely worth the results, and we hope that you do as well. We look forward to the forthcoming release of the book and to finding new ways of pushing the boundaries of cuisine. As we discover more new and exciting things, we will post the results right here, so check back again soon.