Showing posts with label gastronomy. Show all posts
Showing posts with label gastronomy. Show all posts
Saturday, May 30, 2015
Thursday, April 16, 2015
Thursday, May 15, 2014
Tuesday, April 8, 2014
Sunday, September 29, 2013
Wednesday, July 31, 2013
Wednesday, July 24, 2013
NYT: Daniel, 3-Stars
By PETE WELLS
Your job may be worrying you, or your father’s health, or your own. You may have been up at 2 that morning drafting a better ending for a long-ago memory. But certain restaurants, if you can afford them, can knock down the barriers between you and happiness for a few hours. Every taste seems to transport you to another world, while every gesture of the staff convinces you that you live in the privileged center of this one.
Daniel, which turned 20 this year, can make you feel that way. Does chilled pea soup sound like the stuff of privilege? It is when it comes from this kitchen, where Jean François Bruel has been the executive chef since 2003, and which Daniel Boulud, the proprietor, watches over from a windowed perch above the saucepans and sieves.
Those sieves got a workout on this soup, straining it to a gliding smoothness. It had the clear, refreshing sweetness of the smallest peas eaten straight from the pod. Salty diamonds of smoked sable and a white ring of rosemary-infused cream helped the soup’s purity shine more clearly. This kind of exquisitely sensitive, profoundly seasonal, fundamentally French cooking helped lift Daniel to several four-star reviews in The New York Times, the most recent one by Frank Bruni in 2009.
Again and again, I have been startled by the excellence of Mr. Bruel’s ingredients and his talent for unlocking all they had to offer. I have never tasted more calmly flavorful veal tenderloin, or fresher and more gently handled swordfish, or a more skillfully roasted breast of guinea hen.
But some of these star ingredients were embedded in elaborate, multipart compositions that didn’t fully reward the attention they demanded. At times, the restaurant gave the impression that it was trying to garnish its way to greatness.
And while the service can be among the best in the city, with a supreme attentiveness softened by a surprising warmth and even chattiness, it is not always that way for everyone. When people who are known at the restaurant tell me about their meals, they look blissful. Others look disappointed or resentful as they tell me about cramped tables in the neoclassical arcades around the grand sunken dining room and hasty, perfunctory service.
One night I had a reservation 15 minutes apart from a colleague who wasn’t likely to be recognized, as I repeatedly was. We both ordered the six-course $195 tasting menu. (A three-course prix fixe dinner is $116.) Our meals were virtually identical. Our experiences were not.
The kitchen sent two amuse courses to my table. His got one. A few remaining sips of my wine, ordered by the glass, were topped off. His glass sat empty at times while he waited to be offered another.
We both ate extraordinary fried lollipops of filleted frogs’ legs on a long stick of bone, but only I was then brought a napkin-covered bowl of rosemary- and lemon-scented water for rinsing my fingers.
My servers were solicitous: Was this course, or that one, or that one, prepared to your liking? Was the pacing of the meal satisfactory? Could we interest you in a cheese course? Would you like your espresso with dessert, or after? Finally, as I neared the revolving door on East 65th Street: Can we help you find a cab tonight?
My colleague wasn’t asked any of those questions. Still, the next morning, he reported feeling very well taken care of. And a restaurant can’t be blamed for trying to impress a critic.
It can be faulted, though, for turning its best face away from the unknowns, the first-timers, the birthday splurgers, the tourists. They are precisely the people who would remember a little coddling at a place like Daniel for years.
And while a missing finger bowl won’t seriously mar anyone’s evening, missing Daniel’s cheese cart might. It is one of the finest four-wheeled vehicles in New York. Whenever I wondered if I really wanted cheese, a server would lay his knife on a soft wheel, pressing gently. The mounded top would fall for a moment then rise up again, gracefully and almost willingly. After that, the question was not if I should have some, but how many kinds could fit on one plate.
It was just as pointless to try to wave away the basket of Mark Fiorentino’s gorgeous breads, like a garlic focaccia, round and dimpled in the center. Rajeev Vaidya, the head sommelier, shepherded me past the many bottles that could land a weak wine lover in debt to more affordable ones. He has a 2007 halbtrocken from the German riesling maker Georg Breuer. Some buyers scoffed at the vintage, pushing prices down, but not Mr. Vaidya. A bottle can be yours for the princely sum of $25.
Recently, the title of executive pastry chef passed from Sandro Micheli to Ghaya Oliveira, and the dessert course, already exciting, has a little more energy. Ms. Oliveira’s approach is more modern and wide-ranging, embracing unusual spices and exuberant swipes of color. Her mint-scented strawberries are a giddy, flagrant essay in pink, with triangles of watermelon, columns of half-frozen strawberry mousse and ladyfingers tinted with powdered strawberry skin. It was a soft, lilting summer tune I won’t get out of my head before Labor Day.
The courses before dessert could be just as wonderfully haunting. I’d give a lot to recapture the happiness I got from slow-baked abalone, rich with creamed avocado and slightly tart with heart-shaped wood sorrel. I’m still transfixed by a peekytoe crab salad’s bravura variations on apple and celery, carried through to the juices in a walnut-oil vinaigrette.
And nothing quite prepared me for the untamed whoosh of intense green herbs in a bowl of olive-oil-poached cod teased into big, glistening flakes, then seasoned with za’atar and a bright cilantro sauce.
But the kitchen’s compulsion toward complexity could also result in a proliferation of dollhouse garnishes. Grilled sweet shrimp were outfitted with a heart of palm purée, microcubes of mango and cucumber, bok choy, tiny tapioca crackers, curls of shaved hearts of palm, among other things. The parts never quite gathered into a rush of flavor.
A variation on Mr. Boulud’s classic roasted sea bass with syrah sauce came with radicchio so bitter I wanted to slap it. A drum of sweet potato purée with a candylike crust of marrow on top only made the next bite of radicchio harder to take.
The kitchen loves to put two or three treatments of an ingredient side by side, when it might do better to focus on the one that works best. In a triptych of striped jack, a poached piece on a salad of mustard seeds with cubes of riesling gelée tasted as if the components were destined to be together. But there wasn’t the same inevitability about the lettuce-wrapped dumpling of striped jack tartare topped with caviar, or the smoky rillettes surrounded by crunchy carrot and asparagus.
Daniel built its fame on Mr. Boulud’s exquisite refinements on French peasant food. Over the years, the refinements have multiplied while the peasant food has been sent away to his many spinoff bistros.
Traces of it are still around, as in the short rib braised in red wine, half of a beef duo. The last time I tasted it, I was sure it was the finest French beef stew in existence. I knew my servers were trying to make my night one I’d recall with a smile. And I wished everyone could be so lucky.
★★★
Monday, July 15, 2013
Monday, October 15, 2012
Wednesday, May 2, 2012
Saturday, January 21, 2012
Wednesday, March 9, 2011
The Boss
8 March 2011
New York Times
Cook From It? First, Try Lifting It
By MICHAEL RUHLMAN
New York Times
Cook From It? First, Try Lifting It
By MICHAEL RUHLMAN
DESCENDING this week on the culinary scene like a meteor, “Modernist Cuisine: The Art and Science of Cooking” is the self-published six-volume masterwork from a team led by Nathan Myhrvold, the multimillionaire tech visionary who, as a friend of mine said, “decided to play Renaissance doge with food.”
As scientific as it is gastronomic, it is virtually an encyclopedia of cooking, a visual roller coaster through the world of food and cooking tools, as well as a compendium of 1,500 recipes.
Ultimately, it is a manifesto declaring that the new form of laboratory-inspired cooking — led by Grant Achatz in the United States; Heston Blumenthal in England; and Ferran Adrià , the father of this cuisine, in Spain — is a cultural and artistic movement every bit as definitive as Impressionism in 19th-century France or Bauhaus in early 20th-century Germany. It proclaims a revolution “in techniques, aesthetics and intellectual underpinnings of gastronomy.”
At last we can dispense with ill-fitting terms like “molecular gastronomy” and just call it “modernist cuisine.” Thanks, Dr. Myhrvold.
His vision drove the project, and his involvement has been a cause for healthy skepticism and admiration. No chef could have created it and no publisher would be crazy enough to produce and distribute this 40-pound monster.
We now have a definitive work about this cuisine, how and why it works, and the tools and ingredients it could not do without. What it all means, well, I hope to know one day before I die.
For nearly two weeks I lived with this extensively hyped work — immersion circulators humming on my counters, a pressure cooker hissing, food sealer and grinder hot from use beside them — and I remain frustrated that I lack so many tools and ingredients required to actually use this behemoth.
I was left wondering how a book could be mind-crushingly boring, eye-bulgingly riveting, edifying, infuriating, frustrating, fascinating, all in the same moment. Every time I tore myself away from these stunning pages to emerge for air, I had to shake my head so hard my cheeks made Looney Tunes noises.
This work was composed over several years by a team of dozens of chefs and assistants — led by Chris Young and Maxime Bilet — in an 18,000-square-foot warehouse, the laboratory of Dr. Myhrvold’s company, Intellectual Ventures, including a large machinist area and about 4,000 square feet for the kitchen and photo studio. To do it critical justice would require numerous reviewers, versed in physics, chemistry, microbiology, nutrition, mechanical engineering; a chef who practices this rarefied spectrum of the craft; a traditional chef, and a food journalist.
I’m a member of the last group. I have a culinary education and have worked in and reported from many kitchens; I’ve written about chefs considered the best in modernist cuisine; I’ve written numerous books, many of them referenced in this volume. And still I am not qualified to review every aspect of this encyclopedia.
I will get this out of the way fast. The text, and there is a lot of it, is proficient and as compelling as my high school science textbooks. But artful prose is not the point. While the quantity of aspirin required to read this straight through can be measured in thousands of milligrams, the goal was clarity and thoroughness, and the information is indeed clear, sound and, if anything, too thorough. Buried in the verbiage is a treasure of insights, some truly original, some familiar but described from new and compelling angles. Sometimes overly proud of itself, at other times it is recklessly (and admirably) opinionated.
“Saturated fat isn’t associated with heart disease anywhere, in any large study,” the authors write, and go on to malign high-fiber and low-salt diets for people who are otherwise healthy.
Government suggestions for temperatures at which chicken and pork are safe to eat seem “to have been based not on science but on politics, tradition, and subjective judgment.” There is no single safe temperature that kills salmonella, for instance, but rather times that food must maintain specific temperatures to kill it. The authors provide the time-temperature tables.
Several pages are devoted to how to wash your hands and there is a brief foray into the Timurid dynasty of Central Asia; the book includes the equation required to calculate the radiant heat of a gas grill (which is not nearly as effective as a charcoal grill, it says, explaining why). Not sure how to balance your centrifuge? Look no further. On sous vide equipment, the Pacojet, ultrasonic baths, gelling agents, hydrocolloids and emulsifiers, the text is astonishingly thorough.
There are also some exciting reports from the testing kitchen on what is happening to a roast in the oven as the skin dries out and the water just below the surface hits boiling temperatures; why braised food tastes better the next day and dried beans sometimes never seem to get tender (try cooking them in distilled water); the crucial role of humidity in the oven and its impact on baking; and the real reason to rest meat (because dissolved and degraded proteins thicken the juices, not that the juices redistribute, chefs’ stock answer).
The authors occasionally overreach: shocking vegetables in ice water doesn’t halt the cooking, they announce — which may be true (the core temperature of hot food in an ice bath continues to rise, the book shows), but it’s not a distinction to trumpet, since the authors advise doing it anyway because it “pulls heat away from the surface evenly and with remarkable speed.”
Much of the cooking requires ingredients most people haven’t heard of and equipment few can even afford. A rotary evaporator costs thousands of dollars. A not atypical recipe step reads “Cavitate in an ultrasonic cleaning bath for 30 minutes.”
“Modernist Cuisine” is not for most home cooks. For the professional chef, modernist or not, it will be an invaluable reference. For the cooking geek with $625 to spare ($467.62 online), it will be endless fun. As a physical object it is remarkable; sometimes I found myself simply staring at the block of books.
Dr. Myhrvold, the chief technology officer for Microsoft until 1999, spent millions of dollars (more than one, less than 10, he says) to create this. Nothing seems to have been spared on the quality of the photo reproduction, on heavy stock with solid binding.
The food photography is excellent, but even more compelling are the 36 illustrated photographs using kitchen tools and appliances (a pressure cooker, a wok, a barbecue grill) that have been cut in half using an “abrasive water-jet cutter, an electrical discharge machining system, and other machine-shop tools,” the authors write, to help readers visualize what is happening inside a cooking vessel.
And I hope that much of what they’ve compiled filters down through cookbook publishing and into everyone’s cooking.
All the recipes are in metric weights, the easiest and most exact way of measuring. These recipes are laboratory precise, often measuring ingredients to the 100th of a gram. And — unprecedented outside technical baking books — all ingredients are listed as percentages, to scale them up or down as you need. Recipe formats are likewise innovative and, once you get the hang of them, are efficient and effective. As techniques are described, recipes exemplifying those methods are given, some original, many inspired by chefs as varied as Alice Waters, Tetsuya Wakuda and David Kinch, even some from books I’ve been involved with.
Among those worth the price alone for cooking professionals are the scores of parametric recipes, tables giving recommended times and temperatures for a variety of techniques, everything from how long to sous vide different cuts and thicknesses of meat to how long to microwave various vegetables. The table for custard lets you pick your desired consistency based on what percentage of egg you use and the temperature you cook it to, to create a thick Anglaise-style sauce or a stand-alone custard. I tested it, it’s brilliant, I’ll use it forever.
Cooking sous vide, shorthand for vacuum-sealing food and heating it to precise temperatures well below the boiling point, is a foundation technique of modernist cuisine. I saw not a single recipe involving meat where the meat is not cooked sous vide (other than beer-can chicken, roasted at 175 degrees, which gets a whole page treatment).
The book builds from an overview of food history, microbiology and nutrition in Volume 1; to traditional and modern techniques in Volume 2, the science of cooking meat and plants in Volume 3, and the use of thickeners, gels and foams in Volume 4 (which also has a detailed chapter each on wine and coffee). Volume 5 is devoted to recipes for finished dishes, wherein all these chemicals and tools come together to create elaborate modernist meals.
Since these dishes often require returning to tables in earlier volumes, the authors have included a sixth, spiral-bound kitchen manual on paper that could probably go through a dishwasher cycle no worse for wear, though I found its lack of indexing frustrating. (The index for Volumes 1 through 5, crucial for using this book, is superb.)
What few recipes I could actually cook were mainly solid: sous vide time and temperatures were on the money, the recipes clear. Volume 5 includes fabulous barbecue sauces and dry rubs with no unfamiliar ingredients.
The book’s pressure cooker stocks are a miracle: clear, clean and flavorful in a fraction of the time required for traditional stocks. I’ll never make small batches of stock any other way.
The only cooking discipline they do not cover is pastry (perhaps because you can’t cook a pie crust sous vide).
The progenitors of the cuisine have hailed this work as the most important cookbook since Escoffier’s. “The cookbook to end all cookbooks,” the culinary phenomenon David Chang is quoted as saying in its promotional material.
But can this truly be the food of the future, or simply an interesting style practiced by a splinter group of passionate chefs who care about this difficult and expensive form of high-end cooking? Much of this revolutionary cooking is based on ingredients and techniques long fundamental to the processed food industry. Are we to embrace the ingredients and techniques of modernist cuisine at the very moment industrially processed food is being blamed for many of our national health problems?
I have no desire to make Pringles in my spare time, but I wouldn’t stop anyone who did. Dr. Myhrvold and company tell you how. When I finish work, I relax by cutting and chopping and cooking a simple dinner for the family. Dr. Myhrvold has been relaxing by repairing to a cooking laboratory.
In the end, I can only smile, shake my head and bow to him and his crew for their work of unprecedented scope and ambition.
As scientific as it is gastronomic, it is virtually an encyclopedia of cooking, a visual roller coaster through the world of food and cooking tools, as well as a compendium of 1,500 recipes.
Ultimately, it is a manifesto declaring that the new form of laboratory-inspired cooking — led by Grant Achatz in the United States; Heston Blumenthal in England; and Ferran Adrià , the father of this cuisine, in Spain — is a cultural and artistic movement every bit as definitive as Impressionism in 19th-century France or Bauhaus in early 20th-century Germany. It proclaims a revolution “in techniques, aesthetics and intellectual underpinnings of gastronomy.”
At last we can dispense with ill-fitting terms like “molecular gastronomy” and just call it “modernist cuisine.” Thanks, Dr. Myhrvold.
His vision drove the project, and his involvement has been a cause for healthy skepticism and admiration. No chef could have created it and no publisher would be crazy enough to produce and distribute this 40-pound monster.
We now have a definitive work about this cuisine, how and why it works, and the tools and ingredients it could not do without. What it all means, well, I hope to know one day before I die.
For nearly two weeks I lived with this extensively hyped work — immersion circulators humming on my counters, a pressure cooker hissing, food sealer and grinder hot from use beside them — and I remain frustrated that I lack so many tools and ingredients required to actually use this behemoth.
I was left wondering how a book could be mind-crushingly boring, eye-bulgingly riveting, edifying, infuriating, frustrating, fascinating, all in the same moment. Every time I tore myself away from these stunning pages to emerge for air, I had to shake my head so hard my cheeks made Looney Tunes noises.
This work was composed over several years by a team of dozens of chefs and assistants — led by Chris Young and Maxime Bilet — in an 18,000-square-foot warehouse, the laboratory of Dr. Myhrvold’s company, Intellectual Ventures, including a large machinist area and about 4,000 square feet for the kitchen and photo studio. To do it critical justice would require numerous reviewers, versed in physics, chemistry, microbiology, nutrition, mechanical engineering; a chef who practices this rarefied spectrum of the craft; a traditional chef, and a food journalist.
I’m a member of the last group. I have a culinary education and have worked in and reported from many kitchens; I’ve written about chefs considered the best in modernist cuisine; I’ve written numerous books, many of them referenced in this volume. And still I am not qualified to review every aspect of this encyclopedia.
I will get this out of the way fast. The text, and there is a lot of it, is proficient and as compelling as my high school science textbooks. But artful prose is not the point. While the quantity of aspirin required to read this straight through can be measured in thousands of milligrams, the goal was clarity and thoroughness, and the information is indeed clear, sound and, if anything, too thorough. Buried in the verbiage is a treasure of insights, some truly original, some familiar but described from new and compelling angles. Sometimes overly proud of itself, at other times it is recklessly (and admirably) opinionated.
“Saturated fat isn’t associated with heart disease anywhere, in any large study,” the authors write, and go on to malign high-fiber and low-salt diets for people who are otherwise healthy.
Government suggestions for temperatures at which chicken and pork are safe to eat seem “to have been based not on science but on politics, tradition, and subjective judgment.” There is no single safe temperature that kills salmonella, for instance, but rather times that food must maintain specific temperatures to kill it. The authors provide the time-temperature tables.
Several pages are devoted to how to wash your hands and there is a brief foray into the Timurid dynasty of Central Asia; the book includes the equation required to calculate the radiant heat of a gas grill (which is not nearly as effective as a charcoal grill, it says, explaining why). Not sure how to balance your centrifuge? Look no further. On sous vide equipment, the Pacojet, ultrasonic baths, gelling agents, hydrocolloids and emulsifiers, the text is astonishingly thorough.
There are also some exciting reports from the testing kitchen on what is happening to a roast in the oven as the skin dries out and the water just below the surface hits boiling temperatures; why braised food tastes better the next day and dried beans sometimes never seem to get tender (try cooking them in distilled water); the crucial role of humidity in the oven and its impact on baking; and the real reason to rest meat (because dissolved and degraded proteins thicken the juices, not that the juices redistribute, chefs’ stock answer).
The authors occasionally overreach: shocking vegetables in ice water doesn’t halt the cooking, they announce — which may be true (the core temperature of hot food in an ice bath continues to rise, the book shows), but it’s not a distinction to trumpet, since the authors advise doing it anyway because it “pulls heat away from the surface evenly and with remarkable speed.”
Much of the cooking requires ingredients most people haven’t heard of and equipment few can even afford. A rotary evaporator costs thousands of dollars. A not atypical recipe step reads “Cavitate in an ultrasonic cleaning bath for 30 minutes.”
“Modernist Cuisine” is not for most home cooks. For the professional chef, modernist or not, it will be an invaluable reference. For the cooking geek with $625 to spare ($467.62 online), it will be endless fun. As a physical object it is remarkable; sometimes I found myself simply staring at the block of books.
Dr. Myhrvold, the chief technology officer for Microsoft until 1999, spent millions of dollars (more than one, less than 10, he says) to create this. Nothing seems to have been spared on the quality of the photo reproduction, on heavy stock with solid binding.
The food photography is excellent, but even more compelling are the 36 illustrated photographs using kitchen tools and appliances (a pressure cooker, a wok, a barbecue grill) that have been cut in half using an “abrasive water-jet cutter, an electrical discharge machining system, and other machine-shop tools,” the authors write, to help readers visualize what is happening inside a cooking vessel.
And I hope that much of what they’ve compiled filters down through cookbook publishing and into everyone’s cooking.
All the recipes are in metric weights, the easiest and most exact way of measuring. These recipes are laboratory precise, often measuring ingredients to the 100th of a gram. And — unprecedented outside technical baking books — all ingredients are listed as percentages, to scale them up or down as you need. Recipe formats are likewise innovative and, once you get the hang of them, are efficient and effective. As techniques are described, recipes exemplifying those methods are given, some original, many inspired by chefs as varied as Alice Waters, Tetsuya Wakuda and David Kinch, even some from books I’ve been involved with.
Among those worth the price alone for cooking professionals are the scores of parametric recipes, tables giving recommended times and temperatures for a variety of techniques, everything from how long to sous vide different cuts and thicknesses of meat to how long to microwave various vegetables. The table for custard lets you pick your desired consistency based on what percentage of egg you use and the temperature you cook it to, to create a thick Anglaise-style sauce or a stand-alone custard. I tested it, it’s brilliant, I’ll use it forever.
Cooking sous vide, shorthand for vacuum-sealing food and heating it to precise temperatures well below the boiling point, is a foundation technique of modernist cuisine. I saw not a single recipe involving meat where the meat is not cooked sous vide (other than beer-can chicken, roasted at 175 degrees, which gets a whole page treatment).
The book builds from an overview of food history, microbiology and nutrition in Volume 1; to traditional and modern techniques in Volume 2, the science of cooking meat and plants in Volume 3, and the use of thickeners, gels and foams in Volume 4 (which also has a detailed chapter each on wine and coffee). Volume 5 is devoted to recipes for finished dishes, wherein all these chemicals and tools come together to create elaborate modernist meals.
Since these dishes often require returning to tables in earlier volumes, the authors have included a sixth, spiral-bound kitchen manual on paper that could probably go through a dishwasher cycle no worse for wear, though I found its lack of indexing frustrating. (The index for Volumes 1 through 5, crucial for using this book, is superb.)
What few recipes I could actually cook were mainly solid: sous vide time and temperatures were on the money, the recipes clear. Volume 5 includes fabulous barbecue sauces and dry rubs with no unfamiliar ingredients.
The book’s pressure cooker stocks are a miracle: clear, clean and flavorful in a fraction of the time required for traditional stocks. I’ll never make small batches of stock any other way.
The only cooking discipline they do not cover is pastry (perhaps because you can’t cook a pie crust sous vide).
The progenitors of the cuisine have hailed this work as the most important cookbook since Escoffier’s. “The cookbook to end all cookbooks,” the culinary phenomenon David Chang is quoted as saying in its promotional material.
But can this truly be the food of the future, or simply an interesting style practiced by a splinter group of passionate chefs who care about this difficult and expensive form of high-end cooking? Much of this revolutionary cooking is based on ingredients and techniques long fundamental to the processed food industry. Are we to embrace the ingredients and techniques of modernist cuisine at the very moment industrially processed food is being blamed for many of our national health problems?
I have no desire to make Pringles in my spare time, but I wouldn’t stop anyone who did. Dr. Myhrvold and company tell you how. When I finish work, I relax by cutting and chopping and cooking a simple dinner for the family. Dr. Myhrvold has been relaxing by repairing to a cooking laboratory.
In the end, I can only smile, shake my head and bow to him and his crew for their work of unprecedented scope and ambition.
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