My First Memphis in May

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In 1991, I was reading an article about a guy, John Willingham, who had won the World Championship of Barbecue—multiple times, and at multiple championships (like many cult followings, barbecue is claimed by many, so which contest is the definitive World Championship is still up for debate). The most interesting part of the article to me was that he claimed that the key to his whole success was his amazing barbecue cooker, which he had invented. I decided right away that I needed to have one of those cookers.

I called him up and soon discovered what an amazing character he is; he’s a really smart businessman. At the end of our conversation he said, “Well, I’m not going to sell you a cooker unless I get a nondisclosure agreement.”

So I said, “Okay, send me one.” He sent me this five-page legal nondisclosure agreement, which I signed and sent back. It was all pretty standard. Some people might be put off at this point, but I am familiar with NDAs because we use them all the time in the technology world.

The next thing I knew, FedEx delivered a refrigerated box of ribs to my house. It included instructions, which I followed exactly, on how to cook the ribs. These were the best ribs I’ve ever had in my life. At this point, the guy had me totally hooked.

So I called him back and said, “Okay, I’m ready to buy a cooker.”

But John told me, “Well, I won’t sell a cooker to someone I don’t like. In fact, I won’t sell a cooker to most of my friends.”

We had about a three-hour phone interview in which I had to justify that I was worthy of acquiring a cooker. He also had concerns about the rainy weather in Seattle, and how that would affect the cooker. In the end, I did get my cooker, and with it I made the best ribs I’d ever made. But they weren’t as good as John’s. So I tried again, and I tried again, and I called him on the phone. Clearly, I was not quite getting all the elements together.

Exasperated, I said, “John, why don’t I just come down to Memphis and maybe you can teach me.”

He said, “Oh, that’s great. Why don’t you come down in May. We have a little contest coming.”

On my way there I thought, okay, I’m going to have a couple hours of barbecue instruction, and then I’m going to go over to Beale Street and hear some jazz, and then maybe I’ll tour Graceland, and then I’ll go home. It’ll be pretty straightforward, a fun weekend. Well, it turned out his little contest was the Memphis in May World Championship of Barbecue Cooking Contest.

John handed me an apron and said, “You’re on the team; it’s the only way you’ll learn.”

For three days I cooked for 16 hours a day (this was before I went to La Varenne or had even worked in a restaurant kitchen). It was an incredibly intense experience; I trussed a whole hog for the first time in my life. I trimmed about 300 pounds of ribs. Ultimately, they put me in charge of two dishes: one for the pasta category and one for the “anything but pork” category. We made smoked pasta and decided to use ostrich for the “anything but pork.” We won first place for both those dishes, amazingly enough! We also won Best Team Overall. John and his team deserve all of the credit, of course. I was just this weird technology guy who they took under their wing.

I have to say though, my barbecue did get better. Maybe not as good as John’s, but I’m still working on it.

The Memphis in May World Championship of Barbecue will be held this year from May 17 to 19.

Explore MC at the Exploratorium!

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Image courtesy of exploratorium.edu.

Join MC coauthor Maxime Bilet and our very own Scott Heimendinger of Seattle Food Geek as they team up with San Francisco’s Exploratorium and Jeff Potter, author of Cooking for Geeks. As part of the ongoing series Exploratorium After Dark, the three foodies will explore Modernist techniques from centrifuging to sous vide cooking. Exploratorium chefs will prepare tasty treats such as juice caviar and liquid nitrogen ice cream (and if that’s not enough, there will also be a cash bar).

Exploratorium After Dark: Gastronomy will take place at the Palace of Fine Arts on April 5, 2012, 6-10 pm. All After Dark events are ages 18+. Tickets range from $12 to $15. For more information, click here.

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

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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.

The News from Madrid

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Aside from a few frantic e-mails from Max about the technical aspects of Nathan’s presentation, we, who are sadly not in Madrid this week, had not heard much from the team. On Wednesday, Staff Chef Johnny Zhu wrote on his Facebook wall, “Put Madrid Fusión 2012 in the bank. We killed it!” But it wasn’t until we read Colman Andrews’s summary of Madrid Fusión Day Two on The Daily Meal that we knew that Johnny’s statement was not just a mixture of jet lag and bravado.

Next week we’ll give you some of the details firsthand. Until then, read the article here.

Nathan Talks with Danish Food Critic

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While in Copenhagen a few months ago, Nathan Myhrvold chatted with noted Danish food and wine critic and Gastronomiredaktør (gastronomy editor) of Børsen TV, Ole Troelsø. During their 20-minute talk, they discussed how temperature control is like fine-tuning a piano, whether or not all great food must be delicious, working with TASCHEN on foreign editions, and, of course, Nathan’s recent visit to Noma. You can watch the whole video here, on Børsen’s online TV station, which is in Danish. The video starts with Ole speaking in Danish, but he soon switches to English.

Bienvenue! Willkommen! Bienvenida!

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Bienvenue!Bienvenue au site Modernist Cuisine! Maintenant que les éditions française, allemande, et espagnole sont disponibles, nous sommes aussi entrain de mettre tous les aspects de notre site disponsibles dans ces langages afin que tous nos lecteurs aient la plus complete expérience de Modernist Cuisine. Pendant ce temps, nous vous encourageons de visiter la page Modernist Cuisine chez Taschen.com.
Willkommen!Willkommen auf der Internetseite von Modernist Cuisine! Jetzt wo die Bücher in Deutsch, Französisch, und Spanisch erhältlich sind, arbeiten wir daran, die meisten Funktionen unserer Internetseite auch in diesen Sprachen bereit zu stellen, so dass alle Leser den größtmöglichen Nutzen von Modernist Cuisine haben. In der Zwischenzeit empfehlen wir Ihnen die Seite Modernist Cuisine bei Taschen.com.
Bienvenida!¡Bievenidos al sitio de Modernist Cuisine! Ahora que las ediciones del libro en español, francés, y alemán, están disponibles, estamos trabajando para proporcionar todos los beneficios de nuestro sitio web también en su idioma, para que todos los visitantes tengan lo mejor experiencia de Modernist Cuisine. Mientras tanto, le recomendamos que visite la página de Modernist Cuisine en Taschen.com.

See Nathan Alongside Wylie, Emeril, and Others in South Beach

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Nathan Myhrvold will join several esteemed chefs to pay tribute to chef Charlie Trotter and winemaker Piero Antinori during the Food Network South Beach Wine and Food Festival on February 25, 2012, in Miami, Florida. Anthony Bourdain will host the event, which will showcase the talents of the world’s most renowned wine and spirits producers, chefs, and culinary personalities such as:

  • Marchese Piero Antinori
  • Anthony Bourdain (“No Reservations” on the Travel Channel)
  • Frederic Delaire (Loews Miami Beach Hotel)
  • Wylie Dufresne (wd ?50)
  • Michelle Gayer (Salty Tart Bakery)
  • Emeril Lagasse (Emeril’s)
  • Nathan Myhrvold (Modernist Cuisine)
  • Patrick O’Connell (The Inn at Little Washington)
  • Charlie Trotter (Charlie Trotter’s)
  • Norman Van Aken

In particular, Nathan will prepare hors d’oeuvres to be passed during the cocktail reception.

Tickets go on sale October 24, 2011. For more information, click here.

Nathan Talks Texas Barbecue on Bloomberg

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On a recent business trip to Austin, Texas, Nathan Myhrvold seized the opportunity to make a pilgrimage to not one, not two, but four renowned barbecue joints within 24 hours. Writing for Bloomberg, Nathan chronicles his encounters in Texas’s Cult of Smoke: Barbecue-Land Journeys. Driving 35 miles to Lockhart, Texas, Nathan and a few friends dined at Smitty’s, Kreuz Market, and Black’s. The next morning, he woke up at dawn to drive 50 miles to visit Snow’s in Lexington, Texas, a joint that makes barbecue so sought after that the place opens only on Saturday mornings.

Sausage, pork ribs, and brisket served on traditional butcher paper at Kreuz Market in Lockhart, Texas.

Modernist Cuisine covers the art and science of barbecue in great detail. Do you have strong opinions on the subject? Tell us in the comments or on our forum.

Dining at El Celler de Can Roca and elBulli

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Almost four years ago, Chris Young’s first day on the job occurred when he and I had dinner at elBulli. Chris had already agreed to work for me, and he was packing up his stuff for the move to Seattle. Over dinner we talked about food, and I showed him the outline I had made for Modernist Cuisine. It was the start of a project that was bigger than either of us realized (although we wound up sticking remarkably close to that early outline). So, what could be a better way to celebrate the completion of the project than for Chris, Max, and I to pay one last visit to elBulli in the final months that it still operates as a restaurant? (Ferran Adrià has announced plans to halt service at elBulli in July.)

Unfortunately, my schedule is crazy, and it looked for a while like I wouldn’t make it back to Spain in time. When an opening occurred on my calendar (as luck would have it, Chris wasn’t available then), I quickly threw together a group, and off we went. I was joined by Max Bilet, my other MC coauthor; Steven Shaw, a cofounder of eGullet; Dr. Tim Ryan, president of the Culinary Institute of America; Johnny Iuzzini, executive pastry chef of Jean Georges; and Thierry Rautureau, chef of Rover’s in Seattle (where I was a stagier 15 years ago).

Max and I arrived in Barcelona from Paris the night before everyone else flew in, so we had dinner at Tickets: the new tapas bar opened only a month before by Albert Adrià, Ferran’s brother. It is clearly going for a fun and casual atmosphereas one example, the menu has a little icon suggesting which dishes would be good for children.

As at Bazaar, the modern tapas restaurant run by José Andrés in Los Angeles, the menu mixes fairly traditional tapas dishes with Modernist tapas. We sampled plenty of both. Albert is doing a terrific job; the food we had was great. The execution of the more technically challenging dishes was perfect.

The next day, everyone else arrived. An amusing cultural difference one notices in Spain is that the term “wok” is used essentially to mean “Asian restaurant.” As a result, one finds many restaurants with names like “Sushi Wok” or “Ichiban Wok”, the latter advertising Japanese and Argentinian food.

We started our adventure by walking all over Barcelona and visiting three of its famous food markets. La Boqueria is the most famous, and we spent a bunch of time there, looking at the fabulous produce and eating razor clams and octopus at one of the great seafood bars in the market. We also visited Mercat de Sant Antoni and Mercat de Santa Caterina. A picnic with various types of jamón ibérico at the Barcelona marina tided us over until dinnertime.

The first serious eating was dinner at El Celler de Can Roca, which is in the town of Girona, about an hour north of Barcelona, where we were staying. The restaurant is run by the three Roca brothers: chef Joan, pastry chef Jordi, and Josep, who runs the front of the house and an amazing wine cellar.

The previous Can Roca was a very nice restaurant, but it was no architectural masterpiece. I had been there a few years back. The old location is still operated by the Roca brothers, but they moved their flagship restaurant to a spectacular new location. Between the decor and the food, it is one of the truly great restaurants of the world.

Our meal was incredible. We had 15 savory courses followed by seven dessert courses and then petits fours. One of the amusing “courses” was a smell-only course, served as a paper cone that was impregnated with scent. It was interesting, but it also made for some cool photo ops as everyone at the table put the cone over his nose, as we were instructed. Alas, I am not going to describe every course, if I put off this post until I had the time to do that, it would be many more weeks, but the pictures tell much of the story.

The next day, we had to recover from the night before (it was after 3 AM when we got back to the hotel) as well as to prepare for elBulli. As part of the “training regimen,” some of us had another walk around the city, including more market visits and a museum or two. I literally did not consume anything that day, apart from coffee. We arrived a bit early at Cala Montjoi, the bay where elBulli is located, so we took a walk on the beach and then headed to our table. As is their tradition, the first set of courses, or “snacks” as Ferran puts it, is served outdoors on the patio. We then moved inside for our table in the kitchen.

Calling elBulli a “restaurant” and what we experienced a “meal” stretches the meanings of those words beyond their normal usage so much that they barely serve their purpose. If you haven’t ever been to elBulli, this will sound strange. But that’s because elBulli is not like any other dining experience in the world.

Here is an architectural analogy. Our cooking lab is in an ugly single-story warehouse. The building is fully functional in so far as it keeps the rain off our heads (no small matter in the Seattle area), but no one would mistake it for art. Most food consumed in the world is created to refuel people, and it is often just as prosaic as the warehouse. It serves its function, but little beyond that.

In addition to spending time in the lab, I work in an office building. It is a pleasant five-story building, and I have a nice corner office on the top floor. If you had only seen concrete warehouses, then you’d be pretty amazed by this building: it has multiple floors, a dressy lobby, and in some directions, some decent views of Bellevue and Seattle off in the distance. It is clearly a fancier proposition than the warehouse.

A lot of restaurant meals are like my office building. They offer more courses (like the multiple floors), and they are made from more refined materials by much more skilled people. Yet much the way my office building remains essentially a distant relative of the warehouse, these meals, too, serve mundane purposes, albeit with a tip of the hat to aesthetics.

The really great restaurants are more like an office building in Manhattan, where there are many more floors, a lobby of inlaid granite, and some amazing views. These buildings are made by craftsmen who are far more skilled than the people who build warehouses. The design is better, too, and the best of these buildings say, the famous Lever House in New York Citybear the mark of an artist, at least to those who are sufficiently skilled in seeing the subtle features.

Not everyone who walks past the Lever House marvels at the quiet artistry of it. That’s okay because many people don’t need or frankly don’t want to see the art, they want to see a really nice building, which the Lever House happens to be. The same is true for great restaurants, most of them would still be okay for people who just want a good meal. They may miss the finer points, but the food is still accessible.

Now consider a dramatic and iconic building like Frank Gehry’s Guggenheim Bilbao Museum. If all you had ever experienced was a one-story concrete warehouse, you’d be pretty amazed to see this gigantic titanium sculpture. Nothing about it is normal there are no conventional windows, for starters, and it has essentially no right angles anywhere. It is architecture as art, and with its soaring forms, this building grabs you in an emotional way that no warehouse ever could. Those who are schooled in the nuances of architecture pick up more of Gehry’s master work than others do, but even the most jaded tourist is awed by the drama of that building. It is a masterpiece. The man who made it is an artist, and the art comes in the way that it seizes you.

Well, that, times 10, is elBulli (at least for me). As you may have gathered, I like architecture, but I like food more, so take the analogy with a grain of salt. The point is that elBulli offers an artistic experience that is on the magnitude of the greatest art in other categories. As such, it is not really a normal meal, anymore than visiting the Guggenheim Museum is a normal thing you do (at least for people who don’t live in Bilbao).

Instead of public buildings, I could have chosen for comparison homes or any other sort of building. We need buildings for purely prosaic reasons, but we lavish additional care on some of them and turn others into art. If architecture leaves you cold, then one could build a similar analogy around music, or painting, or any of the other arts. So, if you’re a lover of opera rather than an architecture aficionado, it is like attending the Bayreuth Festival. If it is painting that excites you, it is the Louvre or MoMA. You don’t visit those places every day, and you wouldn’t eat at elBulli every day either.

This season, which unfortunately will be the last for elBulli as a restaurant, was true to form. The meal was a stunning series of over 50 dishes. As in the 2010 season, many of the courses came in series of three to five, with each series studying a particular theme from different points of view. One series was about truffles, which was a special feature of this spring’s season because elBulli normally opens to the public during the summer, when truffles are not available. Another series of dishes looked at Japanese themes, one dish comprised thin sheets of ice in an origami envelope. Soy sauce was dripped on top, and there was some fresh wasabi on the ice. That’s it. You ate the dish by grabbing the ice sheets with tweezers and eating nothing but ice with soy and wasabi.

If that sounds strange, well, it was to some degree. But it was also a brilliant commentary on essential Japanese flavors and how they have spread beyond their homeland to invade other cuisines. Today, you can put soy and wasabi on nearly anything (even on Korean tacos from Los Angeles food trucks). In a world where these ingredients can be used anywhere, why not put them on the plainest of substrates?

This was only one of the many dishes, each a work of art expressed in food. Some, like the soy and wasabi, were a commentary or reaction to trends or traditions. Others were purely creative inventions all on their own. Each presented a unique view of food, and it is that search for novel perspectives to which Ferran has dedicated his career so far. It will be fascinating to see what he comes up with in the next stage of his work.

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