OK, I might have gone overboard.

But I had good reason: it was like 90% off the original price.  The guy who owned it had recently shuttered his bed and breakfast venture and just wanted to get it off his hands. I happily obliged.  Of course, being commercial grade, it required commercial voltage.  So I had to get a 240V outlet installed.

OK, so I might have gone overboard.

The Purpose Of Blast Chilling

Why would I want a blast chiller in the first place?  Blast chilling cools food down very fast by using circulating fans to keep the air continuously cold around the food, much like fans in a convection oven keep the air hot and even.  The most common reason to do this is that it keeps your food out of the temperature zone where bacteria grow.

A blast chiller also serves other purposes. It can be used like a cold dehydrator, perfect for accelerating the drying process of chicken skin for combi oven roast chicken.  It is also is a great way station in between the oven or stove top and the freezer.  Keeping your food at room temperature invites bacterial growth.  Immediately sticking it in the freezer or refrigerator brings down the overall temperature, warming up the food already in there.  A blast chiller allows you to get it to the temperature where you can safely store it without messing with your other foodstuffs.  It’s also great for quickly chilling beverages, and who doesn’t like that?

I wanted to try something out to see how it works.  I remembered a post by Ideas In Food about their blast chiller, and how one great use they found for theirs was cooling down pies.  The pies could be made later in the day and still be served the same day, cooled down and set up as if they sat overnight.  Sounds good to me.  Pie it is.

Hot Pie, Cool Pie

First I made a blueberry raspberry pie.  Nothing avant garde or fancy here, just a pie. Mmm, pie.

I took its temperature both on the surface and internally.

191.5F degrees on the surface, 186.9F internally. From there I tossed it into the blast chiller.

I decided to put on blast for 30 minutes.  It dropped 27 degrees in 15 minutes, then 1 degree more the next 15 minutes.

I pulled the pie out and took new reading of the surface and internal temperature.

Externally, it went from 191.5F to 69.5F – a difference of 122 degrees.  Internally, it went from 186.9F to 101.1F – a difference of 85.8 degrees.  That is a huge difference in just 30 minutes.  I wanted to run it for another thirty minutes, but it seems this model would reset first – go up to 38F, and then be ready to blast chill again.  I need to see if that’s the case or if I’m misusing the thing.  But the pie was definitely ready to be served if needed.

Now, it should be noted there’s a much, much cheaper method to cool things down: an ice bath.  It works just as effectively.  But, of course, not everything can be dunked into an ice bath.  Pies, for instance.  And in this case, a blast chiller is a great way to get what you’re cooking from the oven into your belly in a much shorter time frame.

Mmm, pie.

Jethro

Puffed Chicken Foot, or “Party Claw” (photo: Scott Heimendinger)

I threw a big dinner party last weekend.  Well, six people total (including our culinary teammate Scott), but seven courses.  I totally brought it.  But then I was brought down: three of the courses totally sucked.  The pea consommé?  At the last moment I overdid it with the cinnamon oil – it tasted like a bad scented candle.  The Thai beef curry broth was watery and the beef over-tender.  The sous vide vegetables were mushy and lifeless.  Man, was I embarrassed.  But one of the courses did come through: my deep fried chicken feet.  Good thing, too – they took the longest to prepare. I don’t know if I was redeemed, but at least I wasn’t damned.  In the end, fowl became friend.

Feet Slicin’, Bone Pickin’

The Cast Of Characters

Working with chicken feet is one of those products where you’re reminded very clearly where your food comes from.   What once allowed the strutting around a barnyard was now in a pile on my counter top.  The absence of abstraction made me aware of the price the chickens paid to be my meal.  It also made me thankful, as good food should.  It also was a little gory, as one would expect as well.

Take the preparation, for example.  In Modernist Cuisine, they suggest to take a scalpel and needle nose pliers to extract the bones from the feet after cooking them.  I went to my local Asian grocery store, grabbed some chicken feet and stood in line.  It was probably a novelty to see someone like me do this, as an Asian woman behind me pointed out I was buying chicken feet and asked what I was planning for them.  I told her I was going to cook them and then fry them.

“Ah, yes, they puff up,” she said.  That’s what they say in Modernist Cuisine as well.
“Are you going to dry them out first?” she asked.
“Why, yes,” I replied.  Modernist Cuisine has a dehydration step.

She knew exactly what I was making.  I asked her if she had any advice.  She said that before cooking I should cut down each toe so that the bones pop out once they were cooked.  It seemed to make more sense to do it before cooking than after.  I thanked her and decided to modify the recipe based on her advice.

So, then, the gory part: taking a knife and slicing down each toe of every foot.

With that bit of disturbing process out of the way, I was able to vacuum seal it up with water and salt and cook them for twelve hours.  It’s supposed to be done sous vide, but I chose to use my combi oven.

Twelve hours later, they were done and ready to be de-boned.  The woman in the checkout line was right – it was very easy to pull out the bones with the feet pre-cut.

Now, chicken feet don’t have just three or four bones.  The toes are jointed.  There are more like thirteen or fourteen bones, plus the four claws.  So it was quite a process.  I had to work quickly.  As the feet cooled down, they became sticky and gelatinous, making it harder to pull out the bones, tearing whole parts of the skin away.  Below is a fuzzy shot, but gives you an idea of the process.  It’s grunt work.  I felt like a stagier in my own kitchen.

Dry and Fry

Now I was in the home stretch.  I laid out the feet on a perforated tray and dehydrated them in my combi oven for three hours.  They came out slightly sticky and very gelatinous.  Practically begging to be puffed.

I put them in a container and had them ready to go for dinner.  Once the course came around, I put them in oil at 375F, and after a few minutes, pulled them out and set them on a plate with a paper towel.  Once the excess oil came off they were ready to be served.  They puffed up beautifully.

Chicken Feet, Puffed (photo: Scott Heimendinger)

After a good salting, they were ready to go.  The verdict?  They taste just like pork rinds.  This is a great, great thing.  I could eat a bowl of them.  A perfect snack for any occasion.  Plus, like pork rinds, they offer all sorts of flavor variations: BBQ Puffed Chicken Feet, Spicy Puffed Chicken Feet, Salt And Vinegar Puffed Chicken Feet, etc.

They were able to help prop up my dinner after some misfires, so they’ll always have a special place in my heart.  Plus they look funky and kinda freak people out.  This, too, is a great, great thing.

Get On The Good Foot! (photo: Scott Heimendinger)

Jethro

You can’t make a reservation, and you can’t pay.

- Nathan Myrvold on having dinner at the Cooking Lab

Last night I had the rare privilege of attending one of the dinners at the Modernist Cuisine Cooking Lab.  The phrase ‘rare privilege’ can be overused, but in this case, it is completely warranted.  The purity and concentration of their flavors is off the charts.  Twenty-nine courses of it.  Needless to say, but it needs to be said: it was amazing.

But enough of that.  Photos, right?  OK, then, photos:

Snacks

Bread And Butter: Pea Butter

Their version tastes way better than my version.  My centrifuge goes to 1200g, while theirs goes to 27000g.  It makes a difference.

Bread And Butter: Corn Butter

Corn On The Cob: freeze dried corn, brown butter, bbq flavors

Steak Frites: ultrasonic bath, aerated beef mousseline

Grilled Cheese: centrifuged cheese water, trehalose

Vive La France!

Blanket To Go?!: constructed veal marrow cream, kosher

This photo is courtesy of Edmond Sanctis, co-founder of Sahale Snacks.  It floored me and I went a fevered dream state and forgot to take a photo.  This course punched me in the soul.

France In A Bowl: fricassée of snails, frog legs, wild leeks, green almonds, ze wild mushrooms

Le Ski: Apple Snowball: vacuum-aerated sorbet, frozen fluid-gel powder

Tasting Of Northwest Shellfish

Oysters On The Half Shell: cryo-shucked, Taylor’s oysters, sun choke oyster cream

Calamari Salad: crispy squid jerky, mapp flame, Thai flavors

This is one of the best things I have ever eaten.  Blew my mind.  The disc underneath is uni. It is a recent creation by Chef Johnny Zhu.  I thanked him profusely.

Spaghetti alle Vongole: Taylor’s geoduck, vacuum-molded, centrifuged broth

This was before they poured in the broth.  The geoduck was turned into noodles.  Dr. Myhrvold brought a geoduck around for those who haven’t seen one.

Caramelized Scallops: cryo-fried, pistachio and caramelized scallop juice emulsion

More crazy modernist magic – the scallops were raw, but their surface was seared.

Liquid Love

Spring Vegetable Broth: centrifuged peas, pickled Meyer lemon, sheep’s milk ricotta

Liquid Baked Potato: potato ravioli, roasted potato broth, sour cream spheres

Beef Stew: rare beef jus, cured beef marrow, pressure cooked barley

Caramelized Carrot Soup: pressure caramelization, vacuum compression, young coconut

I’m happy to report that the soup tasted like the version I made at home.  It shows that the cookbook recipes are accurate and that it can be done by home cooks as well.  Nice!

Cocotte Of Brassicas: cabbage juice emulsion, flash pickled muscat grapes, LOTS of brassicas

Cream Of Mushroom: bacon infusion, fluid gel foam, sous vide mushroom consommé

A fake cappuccino that was another mind blower.  This should be served at every Starbucks.

Just En Cas…

Raw Quail Egg: a touch of protein to invigorate the appetite

Polenta Marinara: pressure cooked in mason jars

Mushroom Omelet: constructed egg stripes, combi oven, cèpes

The flavor of this, too, I was able to successfully replicate at home.  However, their stripes were PERFECT.  Need to work on my presentations…

King Salmon, Hazelhut And Sorrel: delicate brine, aromatic nuts and seeds, oxalis

Poulet Rôti, Ail Confit, Jus Gras au Vin Jaune: combi oven, modernist rich gravy, pressure cooked confit vegetables

Pastrami And Sauerkraut: 72 h sous vide, MC sauerkraut, cinnamon

Time For Cheese…

Lassi: goat milk, vacuum reduction, mint, chilies, sumac

Fruits And Creams

Ministrone: vacuum infusion, modernist sorbet, candied white beans

This was a very cool dish: a combination of ingredients that are coming into and going out of season.  The sorbet is cucumber.  A light and refreshing “soup”.

Banana Split: centrifuged banana juice

Gelato: constructed creams: pistachio

Gelato: constructed creams: raspberry/macadamia

Gelato: constructed creams

Tea And Coffee: vacuum infusion, acid coagulation

Notice the nice custom serviceware.  You can do that when you have a fully outfitted fabrication studio in the same building.

Sweeties

Gummy Worms: high-fat gel, shaped in fish-lure molds

So that was it.  29 courses.  I thought there was 30 but I guess I was wrong. I made sure to thank every cook and service person.  They were all awesome. Most kitchens are hidden behind the scenes, but they had to do everything in front of us.  Really, just great.  If any of you are reading this – thanks again!  Special props to Scott, of course.  You da man.

On the way out, we traded in our badges for a small box.  I waited until I was home to open the box and see what was in it.  The 30th course, of course.

Bacon Caramel Chocolates, à Emporter

Expanded Mind, Expanded Waistline

There’s not much to say except the obvious: Holy Crap Was That Amazing.  I’m looking forward to continuing my way through the cookbook, and learning to emulate what I experienced. And upon further thought, the philosophy of Modernist Cuisine and its influences will…I think…well…um…

Holy Crap Was That Amazing.

Jethro

My Neighborhood Pho Place

Spring is taking its time arriving this year, and there seem to be more cloudy days than sunshine.  But that’s not a problem – while I wait for the outside to warm up, I can just warm up my insides.  With a Vietnamese pho, to be exact. Cooking Asian food can seem so different than what I’m used to making in the kitchen.  Can my soup match the dish at my favorite local spot?  I turned to Modernist Cuisine to help me in my quest.

Note: It’s way too easy to play on words with the pronunciation of the word “pho”, which is “fuh”.  For instance, we have a chain of restaurants here in Seattle called “What The Pho?“.  I will try to abstain.

A Little Background on Pho

Pho is called the national dish of Vietnam.  But, surprisingly, it has only been around for about 100 years.  It is thought to be a combination of Chinese and French influences – Cantonese noodle soup with the Western addition of red meat instead of fish.  The word “pho” is thought to either be from the Chinese word “fen” or the French “pot au feu”.

There are two types of pho: pho bac and pho nam.  Pho bac is from the North, and is considered more authentic.  Its focus is on the broth and contains just a few ingredients: the noodles, meat and green onions.  Pho nam is from the South and has more herb garnishes like basil and sprouts, different types of meat like tendon and chicken, and additional sauces like hoisin and sriracha.  Pho nam is what is common in the US, and is what I enjoy.  So this is what I tackled in my home.

Pressure Brothin’

The Cast Of Characters

The key to a good pho is the broth.  Now a broth is different than a stock.  Broth is a fully seasoned soup that can stand on its own, whereas a stock is unseasoned and must be further refined before eating. Pho starts with water as the base, so I needed to nail it on the first go.  First off was making a little sachet (there’s your French influence) of spices – peppercorns, cinnamon, star anise and allspice.  I crushed, toasted, and wrapped my little scented packet up.

Next was cutting up the onions and ginger and charring them to get some nice flavor compounds to blend into the soup.  I tried directly on the gas range and I tried a cast iron skillet.  But the fastest and easiest way was with a blow torch. Seriously.

Next was to blanch the beef knunckles (to get rid of any potential bacteria sitting on the surface of the meat) and to sear the oxtail to get more flavor compounds from the Maillard reaction of amino acids and sugar browning the surface.

My components completed, it was time to throw it all in the water and cook it.  This is where a pressure cooker comes in handy.  From Modernist Cuisine:

A pressure cooker…can knock the cooking time down by as much as a factor of eight.  The device works by using pressure to raise the boiling point of water, which normally limits the cooking temperature to 100C/212F…Because the effective cooking temperature is higher, the cooking time can drop substantially.

In this case, down to just 90 minutes.  One key step, however, is to NOT let the pressure cooker release steam.  Although not proven, it seems that venting the cooker lets a lot of the flavor compounds to escape from the broth, degrading its quality.  So I kept a watchful eye and ear, tinkering with the heat occasionally to make sure my cooker was silent and unvented.

After 90 minutes, I let it cool down.  This step will allow the flavor compounds to settle back into the broth before releasing the steam to depressurize the cooker.  I was left with a lovely broth, ready to be strained out, seasoned with salt, sugar and fish sauce, and used.  And by used, I mean eaten.

From Pot to Bowl

So with my broth complete, I just needed to make the rest of it.  For the next component, the meat, I needed to slice it up.  Here I got an excuse to pull out my hip and sexy meat slicer.

Hot Rod Meat Slicer

This was originally Eric’s.  He found it on Craigslist for like $65.  When he moved to Chicago, however, he couldn’t take everything with him, so he gave it to me. He hasn’t asked for it back. Yet.

The sliced meat wasn’t as thin as I would’ve liked, but was enough so that it would cook through in the broth.

I put my pho noodles in boiling water for 10 seconds and then strained them.  I put them in a bowl.  I added the meat, green onions and cilantro.  I poured hot broth over them.  I then garnished with thai basil, lime juice, hoisin and sriracha.  I made a bowl of pho.

Modernist Cuisine came through once again.  I learned how to make a new dish, and learned the science behind the scenes to apply to other cooking forays.  Holy cow was it good.  It was ph-…no. I won’t do it.  I will not make a play on the word “pho”.  It was fucking great.

Jethro

Jet Windy City Gastrophysics

I hear it’s pretty hard to get into high end restaurants.  I’m not so sure – either the problem is exaggerated or I have an awesome lucky streak.  My dinner for Next:Childhood?  I just got online and reserved a ticket.  Benu in San Francisco?  I put in a request on the waiting list and a table cancelled.

So when I wanted to get into Alinea, considered the best restaurant in the US, and even the world (depending on who’s ranking), I called their reservation line.  It was busy.  I called again.  It was busy.  I called again.  They answered and I made a reservation.  I wouldn’t call that persistence.  I guess it’s either not that hard or the food gods want my taste buds to do some worshiping. And if all else fails, of course, you can always rap battle.

With my reservation for two in hand, I gave Scott a call and said “Dude!  You gotta go with me, man.  It’s Alinea.”  He would have to fly out and stay overnight in a hotel just for one dinner.  He was not hard to convince.  He was all in.

I let Eric know we were coming out.  He called me to say that my reservation had been changed from 5:30pm to 9pm.  The reservation was now for four.  Eric and his wife would be joining us.  A reunion of the JCG crew at frickin’ Alinea.  Nice.  Little did I know what I was in for.

Fine, Fine Dining

The day arrived and we met up to prefunk next door at Boka.  It’s a nice place, one star Michelin, but of course we didn’t eat.  I can say they make a great mixed drink, however.  From there we walked into Alinea.  The famous skewed perspective hallway was disorienting, even though I knew about it.  I walked past the door leading directly into the restaurant before it opened so the illusion worked perfectly.  We were led to our table and sat down.  So there I was with the Business Development Manager of Modernist Cuisine Scott and the Culinary Liaison for Alinea Eric and his wife. We were giddy and ready to dive in.

Now as I was just hanging out with great friends, I didn’t scrupulously take photos of every course.  But I did take a few with my phone and, well, here they are:

Woolly Pig, fennel, orange, squid

A freaky little seafood flower perched on one of Martin Kastner’s famous service pieces. That contraption behind the bite is a kombu broth that was brewing for  another course.

Burn Morels, ramp, fiddlehead fern, miner's lettuce

Hot Potato, cold potato, black truffle, butter

Lamb...........?????............!!!!!!!!!!!!!

No, really – that’s what they had it listed as on the menu.  Why?  Because the sheet of glass in the center of the table had SIXTY components to mix and match with your lamb (done three ways).  All sorts of globs and blobs and cubes and cylinders to pick and choose from.  Really fun!

Anjou Pear, onion, brie, smoking cinnamon

Blueberry, buttermilk, sorrel, macadamia

Balloon, helium, green apple

The balloon is so cool!  Food that floats in the air – I think this must be a first.  You pierce it with your mouth and inhale the helium.  I chose to sing a little Billy Joel in my ridiculously high voice.  Then you just right up and eat it – bright green apple taffy.  So cool.

So that’s seven of the courses.  There were twenty five.  The others were as equally over the top and so creative.  From avant concepts like otoro with kaffir lime foam or crushed ice with beet and licorice, to very traditional dishes like steak and frites or a tin of luxurious caviar paired with Russian vodka- they pulled out all the stops and brought it.  And then they pulled out some more.

An Unexpected Surprise

So I had my birthday about 10 days earlier.  I hadn’t seen Eric yet and he threw in an extra special present: a course of chocolate cake with vanilla ice cream just for me.  I was not ready for that and was very surprised. This being Alinea, it wasn’t just any old chocolate cake.  It was presented like this:

A melting cake sphere.  Eric knows me so well.

The Final Course

We were led to another table for the final course.  It was another chocolate dessert: White Chocolate, strawberry, english pea, lemon.  Peas, fruit dust and sauces were strewn directly on the table by two chefs. Next they took white chocolate globes filled with goodies (cotton candy, donuts, flowers), poured liquid nitrogen into them and smashed them directly onto the table, after which they walked away and left the room.  Dramatic and fantastic.

It paired very nicely with a cup of coffee.

Alineated

This was my first restaurant rated as three stars by Michelin.  But I think Alinea doesn’t have just any three stars – they have the three stars from Orion’s Belt.  In Greek mythology, Orion is known as a great hunter.  Grant Achatz and his team are just that – relentlessly searching, in pursuit of the biggest game of all: surpassing one’s own expectations of oneself.  And from what I experienced, they are doing it effortlessly.  If you have an opportunity to go, I think you should.  All it takes is a phone call.

Jethro

It’s been a long time since I’ve tried my hand at spherification, and I thought it was time to revisit the technique.  I’ve done it three times before: the first meeting of Jet City Gastrophysics, my cooking session with Chef Ian Kleinman, and another time when I made some coffee caviar. One of the iconic photos from Modernist Cuisine is their Tomato Basil Spheres, so that seemed like a perfect place to give it another go around.  It’s basically an Insalata Caprese that’s been liquified. Welcome to the future.

Despherification Of A Tomato

The Cast Of Characters

The ingredient list was straight forward – tomatoes, basil, oil, and a couple of additives.  The first task was to make tomato water: to take perfectly round tomatoes and disintegrate them so I could make them round again.  Sometimes you have to destroy the village in order to save it.

But I was going to go the quick route by using my centrifuge to spin the water out of the pulp.  Why wait for hours when 20 minutes will do?

Basil Oil Change

With the tomato water ready, next up was the creation of basil oil. After blanching and shocking (to retain the bright green color) the basil, a quick whipping in the Vitamix with a neutral oil and subsequent straining got me the green gold I was looking for.  I was ready to reconstitute the tomatoes into a new form of their higher selves.

Spherificreation

With my components prepared, it was time to put it all together.  As usual, things didn’t quite go as planned, so improvisation was necessary.

I made my water bath with calcium lactate, and two water baths beside that.  Calcium lactate often leaves a bitter taste, so you need to rinse of your completed spheres at least twice to remove the off-flavors.  Next, I mixed the tomato water with Algin from Texturas, the company created by the Adria brothers.  It’s sodium alginate, but apparently it is more refined than most brands.  It uses only the part of the algae where the reactivity to calcium and texture is best.  Anyway, it’s the suggested alginate in the recipe as well, so might as well do it right.

The next steps were to spherify the tomato water, then inject the basil oil into the sphere while the skin was forming around it.  Here I hit a snag.  Turns out the needle I was going to use to inject the basil was much too small for the oil droplets.

This was, of course, annoying.  I had everything set up and ready to go.  I rummaged around my drawers and found a plastic eye dropper.  Perfectly fine for making caviar but for injecting into a sphere?  Well, let’s find out.

I put my first tablespoon was tomato-alginate into the calcium bath.  I waited about 30 seconds, then inserted the eye dropper into the sphere and pushed the oil into it.  I pushed too hard.

Basil Oil Injection Fail

Lovely.  My calcium bath was now an oiled mess.  But I forged ahead, and was able to create several of the little suckers.

The Elusive Sphere

So I did it and worked as planned.  You pop the sphere into your mouth. With slight pressure from your tongue, the tomato water and basil oil rush out and coat your mouth – a quick burst of Italian cuisine that comes and goes in an flash.  Quite delicious. I think a great variation would be to freeze the spheres, then cover them in mozzarella to make little Insalata Caprese balls.  You would bite into a liquid tomato/basil center – that would be sweet.

But that would be hard to do right now because they weren’t perfectly spherical.  In the Modernist Cuisine photo, they look as round as eyeballs, but in reality, they tend to flatten out a bit.  Could it be there is something in the technique I’m missing?

At first I would say no.  When I had the opportunity to have the elBulli menu at Next, their olive spheres were not perfectly round – they formed to the shape of the spoon.  But I’ve seen diner photos from elBulli where they seem nice and fat and are more spherical.  There must be a way to achieve the perfection of a sphere! It is something that deserves more research.  In the meantime, I’ll pop, burst, taste and reflect on it.

Jethro

I was invited to an Easter brunch yesterday and thought I should bring something along, as is custom.  Although a bottle of champagne for mimosas would have been good enough, I wanted to bring a dish as well.  Of course, there is Easter ham, but I wanted to do something different.  As luck would have it, the crew at Modernist Cuisine put up a riff on traditional Chinese tea eggs to create a special Easter dish.  Perfect!  I went to the store and went at it in the kitchen.

Chinese Tea Eggs, An Overview

Chinese Tea Eggs (photo: Appetite for China)

Chinese tea eggs are a common snack found in China and Taiwan.  Hard boiled eggs have their shells lightly cracked and then they are immersed in a liquid of five-spice powder, soy sauce and tea for three hours or more. Afterwards, the albumen (egg white) is stained with a marbling effect from the tea liquid seeping through the cracks in the shell.  Unique and tasty.

The Modernist Cuisine twist on this classic is twofold. First, they marble it with another color that is natural and not food coloring. Second, they enhance the experience of the egg by slow cooking it so that while the whites are firm like a hard boiled egg, the yolk is warm and runny instead of solid and chalky.  And, of course, they pull it off.  The question is, can I?

Asian Easter Eggin’

The Cast Of Characters

I gathered up my ingredients for the egg: eggs, beets, port wine and salt.  I have no issue with making a avant garde dish with 30 components, but sometimes it’s nice to see a ‘less is more’ approach when cooking up the funky stuff.

First up I peeled and juiced my beets.  My fingers were mauve and barely escaped staining the counters, but I got the job done. From there I mixed the beet juice with port wine and reduced it on the stove.  And my Easter egg dye was complete.

Meanwhile I tackled the eggs.  After a quick three minute boil (to harden the albumen but not cook the yolk), I removed the eggs and put them in a ice bath to cool down.  I realized I didn’t have a lot of ice in the fridge, so I pulled out my ice cream maker bowl out of the freezer and filled in with cold water.  Worked just the same.

After 20 minutes I placed them in a bag and put them in the sous vide bath at 62C for 30 minutes.  The bag keeps the eggs from rolling around in the bath and potentially cracking.  Slow cooking them this way cooks the yolk without coagulating it.

Ping Pong Balls On Top (to help retain heat) and Eggs On The Bottom

After chilling them again, they were ready to get marbled.  I took the back of a spoon and lightly cracked the egg shells, then put the eggs in the beet wine dye to soak overnight.

The next day I pulled them out of the dye, and carefully took the eggshell off the eggs to reveal the marbling.  Quite cool looking, indeed!

But I learned a couple of very valuable lessons.  The first is to make more than you think you need.  Why?  Because the shell might not quite peel off as smoothly as you were hoping, and you’re left with a ruined egg and a big mess.  Not to mention, you’re now shorthanded on the number of dishes you can serve.  In my case, everyone ended up sharing a dish instead of having their own.  Oops.

The other important lesson I learned: if you reheat the eggs using a sous vide setup, make sure the eggs don’t come into contact with the water.  The beet-wine marbling comes off rather easily!

I went in the general direction of the plating suggestion they had and it was great.  The egg looks mighty bright and Easter-y sitting upon a colorful assortment of vegetables.  The texture of the egg was everything you’d expect from using a sous vide setup: an impossibly creamy yolk surrounded by a denser egg white.  It was enjoyed at the brunch and I once again learned a lot in my home chemistry lab, the kitchen.  Thanks Modernist Cuisine!

Jethro

They were expecting a gourmet three course meal.  Eric, however, provided them with a Northwest-style Modernist ten course extravaganza.  A foraged carbonara?  ‘Low Tide’ – a dish that resembled the beach at that time of day?  That and then some.  Eric brought it.  Check it out at their website or check out the videos below. Make sure you at least check out Episodes Three and Four, which feature Scott and Eric, and Eric’s epic cooking skills.

Enjoy!

Jethro

Episode One

Episode Two

Episode Three

Episode Four

Episode Five

Short story: ‘like’ us on Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/JetCityGastrophysics.

Long story: So we thought it would be good to have a place to update you on various topics that orbit around Modernist Cuisine but not specifically to it.  From gardening to restaurant news to events and whatnot, our Facebook page will keep you informed on things we find interesting that are going on.  It’s a lot like our separate Twitter accounts (here, here and here), but all three of our food interests combined into one big superpage of food awesomeness.  What’s not to like?

The JCG Crew

I knew two things before beginning this experiment: 1) the quinine in tonic water fluoresces under UV light, and 2) oysters are “filter feeders,” meaning they trap particles from the water as a means of taking in nutrients.  Modernist Cuisine includes a recipe, which is an adaptation from Dave Arnold and Nils Noren, for Beet Juice-Fed Oysters (book 3, page 206).  The recipe calls for submerging live oysters in beet juice strained through a 500 micron sieve and letting them feed for 48 hours.  The flesh of the oyster turns pink and red as it takes on the microscopic particles of beet juice.

Following this example, I thought there was a good chance that the oysters might filter the quinine out of tonic water in the same way, leading to slightly sweetened oysters that would glow iridescent blue under a black light.  In my experiment, however, they did not.  The picture you see above is one of my test oysters under a fluorescent UV bulb.  Although it looks cool in the photo, it is very much not fluorescing.  If I put a white cloth next to the oyster, the cloth lit up like a warehouse rave, but the oyster was only reflecting the bluish hue of the visible light from the UV blub.  Interestingly, a portion of the shell just at the hinge is fluorescing (it’s a brighter blue-green in the picture) but I did not achieve my intended result of an iridescent mollusk.

Why didn’t it work?  I have a few theories:

1. Perhaps the oysters were DOA.  Shamefully, I purchased the oysters at the type of grocery store that also sells name-brand cola and US Weekly.  I should have known better, and I’ll never do it again, but it’s quite possible that these fugly-ass oysters were dead before I got them home.
2. Salt problem?  The Modernist Cuisine recipe calls for 2.6% aquarium salt.  I’m not sure what that is, so I used regular table salt.  Perhaps that’s an important difference.
3. Is tonic water lethal to oysters?  The shells were still tightly closed when I removed them.  I did notice that, for about 30 minutes after I covered the oysters in tonic water, they were releasing a constant stream of very small bubbles from the edges of their shells.  I assume this was a result of them circulating the water through their muscular little bodies.  But perhaps the fact that the bubbles stopped after 30 minutes is evidence that they didn’t survive the pre-cocktail environment of a bottle of Canada Dry.
4. The quinine in tonic water might be inaccessible to the oyster’s filtration system.  Either the quinine particles are too large, too small, or for some other reason can’t be filtered by the oysters.
5. Not enough quinine?  Perhaps everything did work as I anticipated, but the concentration of the quinine was just to weak to show up in the oyster bodies.

I may repeat this experiment with higher-quality oysters and additional quinine.  Alternately, if any geneticists out there want to grab the fluorescence gene from a modified zebrafish and put it into a Samish Sweet or a Blue Pool, I’ll gladly shuck and slurp with you!

Scott