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

5 Tips for Culinary Deception

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What better time to trot out our favorite deceptive culinary tricks than April Fool’s Day? We devoted a section of Modernist Cuisine to trompe l’oeil because it is particularly suited to the Modernist movement. Though it has a long history, dating back to dishes such as mock turtle soup in the 19th century, culinary deception has been embraced in recent years by chefs such as Wylie Dufresne, Andoni Luis Aduriz, and René Redzepi.

The key in each of the tips below is to both surprise and delight the senses. There are no malicious tricks here. These tips serve to enhance the senses, present food in creative ways, and keep guests living in the moment. It wouldn’t serve our purposes to develop recipes that don’t taste good!

  1. Raw “Eggs”: One of our favorite culinary tricks to play on visitors to our lab is to convince them that we are serving them a raw quail egg. Anjana Shanker, development chef, who usually whips up this recipe, has gone so far as to make up a story that we discovered a nest of quails on the roof, and started domesticating them for their eggs. In reality, we serve spherified passion fruit and lemongrass in a real quail egg shell. Watch the video above to see what happened when the guys from Tested.com dropped by. Anjana’s technique is included in the video as well.
  2. Mystery Meat: Trompe l’oeil dishes have a long history of substituting one food for another. Besides being just for fun, this is often due to economic reasons (such as mock turtle soup or surimi) or dietary restrictions (as in veggie patties). Sometimes, it can be both! This April Fool’s Day, enlist a vegetarian friend to help play a trick on party guests by casually eating what appears to be meat. Our favorite and most convincing dish is to creating bulgogi out of watermelon, originally designed by Andoni Luis Aduriz at Mugaritz. Cut 2.5 cm / 1 in “steaks” out of seedless watermelon (leave a little bit of the white part of the rind in as a fat cap). Soak the watermelon in a brine (20% water and 1% salt) for two hours. Pat the watermelon dry and dehydrate the slices at 55 °C / 130 °F until dry and leather-like, about 8–12 hours.
  3. Eat Dirt: In the video below, we use chocolate cookies to make fake dirt to go along with our fishing-lure-molded gummy worms. This is the fastest and easiest way to make fake dirt, but in Modernist Cuisine we have a savory version using black bread, chicory root, mushroom powder, and a few other ingredients. We’ve also made fake coals out of cassava roots, simmered with fish stock and squid ink (another recipe inspired by Aduriz).
  4. Impregnated Fruit: Sometimes it’s not the eyes that play tricks, but preconceived notions. When your guest bites into an apple, they expect it to taste like an apple, but by using Modernist techniques, you can impregnate said apple with flavors, such as curry, for a delightful surprise. Vacuum seal a peeled and cored apple with apple juice and spices for 12 hours. Then place the bowl in a chamber vacuum sealer and pull the vacuum three times, holding for 15 minutes the final time. If you don’t have a chamber vacuum sealer, you can also achieve this effect with a whipping siphon. One favorite combination is to infuse celery with apple juice. Place the celery in the siphon, and cover it with apple juice. Then charge with two cartridges of nitrous oxide. Chill it for two hours before serving.
  5. Healthier Substitutes: Sometimes a bit of culinary deception can improve your health. At El Bulli, Feran Adrìa once served grated cauliflower in lieu of couscous. Use a microplane to grate the cauliflower until it is the size of grains. This surprise is especially effective after serving your family real couscous three nights in a row.

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Behind the Scenes at a Lab Dinner, Part 2

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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 cryo-shucking, 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 table-side. 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.