Día de los Muertos

This fall, we found ourselves inspired by the sentiment and iconography of Día de los Muertos (Day of the Dead). A two-day holiday, it begins November 1st with All Saints Day, when the spirits of infants and children are honored, and is followed by All Souls Day, honoring adults. Both holidays are a way of commemorating the lives of deceased loved ones, but the festivities are far from morose, and the mood is far from somber.

Head chef Francisco Migoya grew up in Mexico City, where he celebrated Día de los Muertos each year, often going to the village of Mixquic, which is famous for its celebrations. Sometimes referred to as “City of the Dead,” the village is home to the church of San Andrés Apóstol and its surrounding cemetery, which became the epicenter of commemorations. “It’s where most of these traditions are kept alive,” said Migoya. In Mixquic, the festival spans three days and is attended by thousands. It concludes with La Alumbrada on November 2nd, when the cemetery is awash with the glow of candles and people hold all-night vigils at gravesites.

Day of the Dead Illustration 2            Day of the dead, Francisco Migoya, 2014  

 

“A celebration centered on death might sound somewhat morbid to other cultures where it’s more taboo. [Día de los Muertos] is really a huge celebration that, in some ways, makes light of death…” said Migoya. For two days, vibrant processions snake through towns, and families build colorful altars called ofrendas at gravesites or in their homes to encourage spirits to visit, celebrate, and once again enjoy the luxuries of corporeal life.

The holiday is a feast for the senses. “There are specific flowers that are tied to the holiday. Marigolds and cockscomb flowers… You can smell the burning candles, incense, and Frankincense from the altars all day. Those smells are a big association with Día de los Muertos,” Migoya added.

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Flowers, stories, possessions, toys, and, of course, foods and libations, are offered to welcome home the spirits for the holiday’s duration. Traditional holiday staples, including sugar skulls and Pan de Muerto, are prepared, as well as the spirits’ favorite dishes.

 

Sugar Skulls

Intricately decorated sugar skulls, or calaveras, with names of the deceased written across the foreheads, represent departed spirits. They are typically covered in labyrinthine patterns of vibrantly colored icing that seemingly breathe life back into the spirits. Throughout the holiday, the skulls serve as gifts between friends and family.

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Chef Migoya based our sugar skulls on traditional recipes. First, he mixed sugar, water, and egg white powder until the mixture produced a texture similar to wet sand. Next, the mixture was pressed as tightly as possible into molds. “The process is similar to building sandcastles. Filling the molds is like filling buckets with sand. You want to pack them as tightly as possible so that the sugar skull pops out intact…” The skulls were dried on cardboard (permeable surfaces are preferable) and, after five hours, were hollowed out to reduce the weight of the skulls and make them easier to work with. After drying them for an additional 24 hours, they were decorated with a simple icing made of water, powdered sugar, and a little bit of citric acid; the skulls were then placed under a fan to keep the icing shiny. “The citric acid prevents the sugar from crystallizing. And the faster the icing dries, the shinier it will be.”

 

Pan de Muerto

Pan de Muerto (Bread of the Dead) also adorns ofrendas and is eaten during the holiday. This soft, yeasty bread is lightly sweetened and typically flavored with anise- and orange-blossom water, giving the bread a delicate taste and enticing aroma. The bread maintains the iconography of Día de los Muertos—before baking in the oven, the dough is rounded, topped with pieces shaped like long bones (representing the deceased), and dusted with sugar.

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We just happened to have a gorgeous skull stencil at The Cooking Lab, so we decided to put it to good use for our Pan de Muerto. We shaped our dough into a large boule (round) and dusted sugar over the stencil. The small notches around the bread’s edges represent traditional bone decorations. We then augmented the supernatural quality of our Pan de Muerto by adding clouds of liquid nitrogen.

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Gift Guide 2013: Gifts for Modernist Cooks

Whether you’re purchasing one of our books for a loved one or buying gifts for someone who has already added one of our volumes to their personal library, this year we devoted our gift guide to items that pair perfectly with Modernist Cuisine and Modernist Cuisine at Home. From stocking stuffers to larger gear, we have you covered. We even selected a few ingredients to help you launch your own journey into Modernist cooking.

Modernist Cuisine

Water Bath: This year, give the gift of sous vide. We suggested gifting sous vide setups in previous years with good reason: a water bath is an essential tool for many of the recipes we created for Modernist Cuisine and Modernist Cuisine at Home. While there are ways to improvise, this is the best tool for regularly cooking sous vide or for any cooking task requiring precise temperature control. Water baths are also the perfect way to heat up holiday leftovers. The SousVide Supreme ($329 and up) is sufficient for most home uses, but the PolyScience Sous Vide Professional immersion circulator (Creative series, $399), paired with a polycarbonate tank ($33 for a 10 L tank), provides more uniform heat distribution.

Cook the lamb sous vide for 3 hours.

Blowtorch: From caramelizing crème brûlée to searing sous vide meat, there are many practical (and impractical) reasons to keep a blowtorch handy in the kitchen. A blowtorch is an inexpensive gift (we like the Bernzomatic TS4000 Trigger Start Torch, $34) that’s great for recipes that call for high temperatures unattainable in conventional ovens. It’s also an impressive tool to pull out during holiday gatherings and dinner parties.

Modernist Cuisine™ Gel Noodle and Spherification Kits: 130 pages of Modernist Cuisine are devoted to the science of gels because creating gels is a fundamental technique of Modernist (and even conventional) cooking. The Gel Noodle and Spherification kit ($40 and $50) are a fantastic introduction to the art of creating these magical treats in your kitchen. Each kit comes with some essential tools to get you started as well as enough ingredients to create 20 batches of gelled noodles or spheres. And the kits just happen to be stocking size.

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Borosilicate Flasks and Beakers: Flasks and beakers aren’t necessarily a Modernist must, but these lab tools are incredibly handy to have in the kitchen. If you need to measure volume, beakers and flasks are highly accurate and have greater heat resistance than conventional Pyrex. Plus they double as a very nerd-chic container for cocktails. This SEOH 5-pack of beakers ($14) is a great starter set, but there are many, many options available online.

Modernist Cuisine at Home

Digital Scale: Begin applying more precision to your measurements with a reliable, digital gram scale. These scales are easy to find at cooking stores, and basic models are inexpensive. You should really own two: a general-purpose scale that accurately measures weights from one to 1,000 grams and an even more precise scale accurate to a tenth or hundredth of a gram. A 0.1 g scale is a must-have for measuring hydrocolloid thickening and gelling agents. We recommend the Digital Bench Scale ($49) for extra-large batches and the Extreme‑Precision Digital Ingredient Scale ($27) for its compact portability.

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Thermometer: The pockets of chef jackets have one thing in common: thermometers—and for good reason. Thermometers are indispensable kitchen tools. Small changes in temperature can make all the difference in cooking, so thermometers are essential. A good digital thermometer can even take the place of a fancy sous vide cooker. Our favorite is the Taylor Professional Thermocouple Thermometer ($78), which is extremely accurate and allows you to measure food temperatures in both water baths and ovens. Even an inexpensive instant-read thermometer will give you excellent range and speed, and it’s useful for almost any application.

The Modernist Cuisine™ Special Edition Baking Steel: Andris Lagsdin, a pizza enthusiast who works at a family-owned steel company, was inspired to produce Baking Steels after reading Modernist Cuisine. We worked with Andris to develop the Modernist Cuisine edition, a preseasoned, shatterproof ⅜ in thick steel plate. Based on our own research, we designed it to be an optimal combination of performance and usability. It’s the perfect tool to help create any of the pizzas from Chapter 18 of Modernist Cuisine at Home, and it’s easy to use: simply slide it into a conventional oven for perfect pizzas or place it on top of a burner to use as a griddle. You can even use it as an anti-griddle to make ice cream.

steel 20 degree on white with pizza

Sodium Citrate: If your loved one is a cheese lover, a packet of sodium citrate ($7 for 50 g, $15 for 400 g) is an inexpensive, world-changing gift. Essentially the combination of salt and citric acid from citrus fruits, a tiny bit yields silky smooth Mac and Cheese or wonderfully melty cheese for dips and sandwiches. Appearing in over 20 cheese-based recipes in Modernist Cuisine at Home, sodium citrate is a staple ingredient.

Mac and cheese variations

Gift Guide 2013: Gifts for Food Photographers

Searching for the perfect gift for the photographer in your life? Look no further than the pages of The Photography of Modernist Cuisine for inspiration. Taking cues from some of our favorite photos in the book, we’ve put together a list of must-have gifts for the holiday season. Whether your loved one is new to the world of photography or a seasoned vet, we hope this gift guide will be an invaluable resource for you.

 

PR_Nathan shooting Blender IMG_5186_Enlarged_Blur 40 px The Basics

Canon 1DX_X8A3463Our favorite cameras are professional DSLRs from Canon. These cameras are indispensable tools, even for passionate amateur photographers. And for those who are serious, it is worth investing in a high-quality DSLR camera body. The Canon EOS-1D X (5253B002, $6,799) has the ability to capture sharp, accurate, and high‑quality images. It is also incredibly water resistant and has a durable frame, making it useable in a variety of conditions.

 

PR_Canon EF 24-105mm 4.0  L_205242In truth, lenses are almost always more crucial to the quality of the photo than the camera body. The Canon 24–105 mm f/4L zoom lens (0344B002, $1,149) is an all‑purpose, versatile lens that allows you to quickly shoot a range of frame widths. It’s a great option for situations in which you can only take one lens with you.

 

Believe it or not, a good monitor goes a long way when it comes to photography, which is why it makes a great gift. You don’t have to spend thousands of dollars on a nice monitor that will display 99% Adobe RGB with 1.07 billion colors. That’s right, billions of beautiful colors with the bonus of smooth gradations. Try out Dell’s UltraSharp 24 in (U2412M, $267 and up) or 27 in (U2713H, $599 and up) PremierColor LED-lit Monitors.

Cold Opener

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Macro Shots

To capture truly gorgeous macro shots, we recommend the Canon 100 mm f/2.8L macro lens (3554B002, $1,050). If you’re on a smaller budget, the non-L version (4657A006, $600) will provide you with similarly impressive results.

Improving image quality starts by improving a camera’s flash. Off-camera flashes allow photographers to create better lighting angles. The Canon Speedlite 600EX‑RT (5296B002, $549) or 430EX II (2805B002, $299) are great choices for any photographer using a Canon DSLR. The Canon Off-Camera Shoe Cord OC-E3 ($70) allows you to hold the flash up to 2 feet away from the camera and still maintain all E‑TTL II functionality; at $70, it’s a wise investment.

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Micro Shots

In food photography, mid-range laboratory microscopes are useful for imaging the cellular structure of plant tissue or details such as the fat-covered bubbles in whipped cream. Microscopy is a different art form from photography in many ways because the light-scattering properties of matter change at the microscopic scale. A good‑quality microscope typically comes equipped with five or more objective lenses, ranging in magnification from 10:1 to 100:1. We use the Nikon E800 microscope ($6,999) with Nikon CFI objective lenses; however the newest incarnation of the model is the Nikon Eclipse Ni-U (price varies depending on configuration).

Circular Polorizer_X8A3461Polarizing filters, like this Hoya 77 mm Evo Circular Polarizer ($89), help to enhance picture quality by blocking harmful reflected light. It can be used to reduce light reflections from glass and liquid surfaces or to improve color saturation. An example of this effect can be seen in this image from The Photography of Modernist Cuisine called “Kaleidoscopic Vitamin C,” where the use of a polarized filter helped create an explosion of colors.

Eggs and Bullet sequence

High Speed Images

Remote triggers serve as the communication link between a camera and its flash. The trigger, which is usually mounted on the hot shoe, uses radio signals to synchronize flashes so that they fire at the exact moment when the shutter opens. We suggest the PocketWizard MultiMAX ($249 and up).

The Phantom V12.1 is something of a dream gift for any photographer (or director, for that matter). It’s akin to asking your parents for a pony for the holidays. Because our PR_Phantom Rear angle With Shadow V2_171321_M=Creflexes often aren’t quick enough to capture a fleeting moment of action, our studio uses high-speed video cameras like the Phantom V12.1, which can shoot up to a million frames per second. This allows us to capture moments that otherwise wouldn’t be seen by the naked eye.

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Cutaways

Some of the contents of our cutaway shots were literally held together by pins and needles. Add sewing pins to your gift list; they’re an essential tool for capturing the momentary (and fleeting) precision of a cutaway. Sewing needles are easy to hide from view or remove during editing when they can’t be fully hidden.

Salad Bowl supporting 4For a serious photographer, color is incredibly important. To achieve truly brilliant colors like those in our vegetable garden cutaway, we used the X-Rite ColorChecker Passport ($89). By taking a picture with the ColorChecker in the frame, you can easily white-balance your images during post processing. This great tool also helps photographers create custom color profiles for individual scenarios.

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On The Go

A pocket-sized tripod, like the GorillaPod ($14 and up), is an incredible gift for budding food photographers who like chronicling their meals and adventures on the go. When you don’t have much control over the lighting in your environment, a tripod can help eliminate some of the blur that you experience when taking photos in ambient lighting. Compact and portable, these small tripods connect to digital cameras of all sizes, even cell phones, making them an easy tool to carry around for impromptu shoots or to catch fleeting magical moments.

Another simple lighting gift for photographers is a portable reflector, like this 32″ Impact 5-in-1 Collapsible Disc ($38). Portable reflectors help diffuse tricky lighting in the field or in the studio. The disc itself helps soften lighting, and the removable slipcover can be used to reflect light for shadowing effects.

Modernist Mother’s Day

Mothers are important. Mothers are many people’s gateway to food and cooking. On the Modernist Cuisine team, this is no exception. Nathan’s mother famously let him prepare Thanksgiving dinner when he was only nine years old, kicking off a lifelong love of cooking. Sam Fahey-Burke first began making buckeye cookies with his mother as a child. Johnny Zhu’s mother provided the inspiration for our recipe for Microwaved Tilapia. So, it is perhaps fitting that Mother’s Day has traditionally been a day of cooking and eating. In this light, we assembled a brunch menu with a few favorites from our library.

Because it’s not brunch without eggs:

Striped Omelet
Liquid Center Egg
Scrambled Egg Foam

More than mere toast:

Chorizo French Toast
Garlic Confit on Toast
Barley Salad with Spinach Pesto
Bagels with Sous Vide Salmon
Pressure-Cooked Shrimp and Grits

Remember to eat your vegetables:

Asparagus with hollandaise
Deep-Fried Brussels Sprouts

As sweet as she is:

Frozen Fruit Rolls
Lemon Curd
Popping Buckeyes
Coffee Crème Brûlée