Mad scientist on the loose!

Oh man, the science experiment today was great! My last post didn't have any pictures, so this time I'm making up for it with a photoessay. Here's what we did:

Make some Earl Grey tea and mix in some sodium alginate (which is a seaweed derivative).

Drop this mixture into a bath of calcium chloride (a simple salt). We made some big blobs using a teaspoon:

and zillions of small drops using a multi-dropper gadget that came in the kit:

(I would like to note that I refused to read the directions for this setup and I injected the tea into the droppers instead of sucking it up through the tips, which later perusal of the instructions revealed was specifically noted as something you should not do; this reckless experimental streak is why research scientists say that a week in the lab can save you an hour in the library.)

Once the drops are in the calcium chloride solution, you wait 30 seconds, then scoop out the blobs:

I need some practice before we go prime-time, but this is cool.

It's incredible! The alginate and calcium react to form a thin "skin" on the outside of the blobs, which makes it possible to pick up a blob of tea. When you put it in your mouth (or pop it with a fork) it bursts, so it's like you took a bite of something and it turned into a sip! It's a very strange sensation--all of us stood around for an hour just playing with the blobs and eating them. The most fun part was watching each person's face as the blob turned the liquid in his mouth--it was a shock even when it was our second or third time trying it! We pulled some people in from the cafe and made them try it too, just to watch more people's reactions.

What are we going to do with this? I don't know, but it's fun!

Booking and cooking

Now that our Après schedule has settled into a routine, I have Fridays off. After a few weeks of sitting around and wondering what I used to do with myself on my days off, I decided that I'll start cooking again. This sounds kind of funny, since obviously I cook the other six days of the week, but I haven't cooked for myself at my house in years. It's not that I'm tired of cooking now that I do it for a job, it's just that I'm usually at work around mealtimes, and I don't feel a need to cook at home any more. But it's always annoyed me when restaurant cooks try to teach cooking classes but they've obviously forgotten what it's like to cook at home, so I don't want to lose touch with the experience of cooking without the 17 saucepans and 100 square feet of counter space that we have at Generous Servings. Plus, I'm a nicer person when I cook.

I'm also a nicer person when I have a lot of good books to read, and I've been totally out of books for a month or so now. I've had to resort to reading the various alumni magazines that show up in my mailbox (amusingly addressed to Dr. Brinig), which are so self-congratulatory that I can only handle a few pages at a time. Then a few weeks ago, I was doing some recipe research online and I stumbled upon Orangette, a food blog written by Molly Wizenberg, and I became completely obsessed.

I've known about Orangette for years, because Molly Wizenberg also writes a column for Bon Appétit, but I've carefully avoided ever looking at her blog. For one thing, I think blogging is self-indulgent, and reading blogs is a little like playing with imaginary friends (yeah, I know, yet here we are). For another, the quality of writing in most blogs is abysmal. And finally, the first of Wizenberg's Bon Appétit columns that I read featured a sappy story about her husband, Brandon, and seemed to be mostly about how cute they were, with a recipe tacked on to the end as an excuse for publishing the essay in a food magazine. As far as I can tell, it's in her contract with Bon Appétit that she will always tell a lovey-dovey story about Brandon, regardless of the supposed topic of the column.

However, now that I've started reading Orangette, I am totally charmed by it. Wizenberg's writing is fantastic, and the Brandon stuff is more interesting when you (creepily) watch their relationship develop in "real time" in her blog. The mushy parts still make me a bit queasy, but the blog has a truer focus on food, and the real hook is that every single dish she writes about makes me want to get up and cook it. Right then. Regardless of time of day, season, or even whether I like the food she's describing. She cooks, takes pictures of, and writes about simple, straightforward food with such passion and clarity that I just can't read enough. I've started going through the archives of the blog from the very beginning (2004), and I've spent at least 20 hours over the past week reading it.

So when I resolved to start cooking on Fridays, I had a bunch of Orangette recipes that I wanted to try. However, there were some unexpected obstacles. First, I have no ingredients at my house. Seriously, none. Anything perishable perished long ago, and even my pantry staples have somehow migrated to Generous Servings during various emergencies. Second, most of my kitchen equipment has taken up permanent residence at Generous Servings as well. Third, I've forgotten how to use my oven.

This past Friday I decided to make this asparagus flan, which is a perfect example of something that I really don't like (custards are a hard sell for me) but chose because it happened to be in the Orangette post I was reading at that moment, which triggered this spastic compulsion to cook whatever she writes about. Inexplicably, I also chose to make braised cabbage, which is more up my alley in terms of flavors, but is totally out of season and really doesn't go with asparagus flan. And the meal was...a disaster. Well, the cabbage was good, but the flan didn't work: it never set, and eventually I got tired of waiting and took it out of the oven, and when I turned it out onto a plate, it oozed into a puke-green, gelatinous, lumpy puddle. Yum. In hindsight I think I could have applied some lessons from my high altitude crème caramel experience, and it might have helped if I had turned my oven onto bake instead of preheat (but how are these settings different? I looked in my user's manual and online and still can't figure it out).

While the flan was cooking (or not), I read another Orangette posting about popovers, and suddenly I had an irresistable urge to bake a dozen popovers at 10 pm (and I had 2 eggs left over from the flan, so I actually could make them). I have a great recipe for popovers that I often teach in my baking classes, yet I decided to make the Orangette recipe without stopping to compare the two. After I made the batter I discovered that my muffin tin relocated to Generous Servings at some point, so I had to bake the popovers in a weird nonstandard shallow tin that I must have inherited from someone. Guess what? They didn't work--there was no pop in my overs. They ended up in the trash, along with the flan, and all I had to eat was cabbage.

So the cooking-for-myself plan is not working out too well so far. Luckily, in the past few days two kind people lent me books to save me from book-deprivation insanity. One was Molly Wizenberg's book, A Homemade Life, which is a lot like her blog. I read it all in one day, like the crazed stalker I have become.

The other book was a glossy coffee table tome from the Chicago restaurant Alinea, which is famous for its molecular gastronomy cooking (you know, all kinds of crazy flavor combinations with ingredients that are gelled, frozen, freeze-dried, set on fire, turned into foam, centrifuged, etc.--you pay $150 for them to serve you 24 courses of items not immediately recognizable as food). I have never paid much attention to the molecular gastronomy fad: for a long time, I had real science experiments to do, and felt no need to experiment on my food. In fact, I sort of hate "experimenting" with cooking: I want my food to work, every time. But I've gotten a little curious recently as I've been thinking about some new garnish ideas for Après, and one thing led to another, and now I'm staring at pictures like this with my mouth open in shock. Is this even appetizing, or simply novelty for its own sake? Do we need pumpernickel ice cream and pickle powder? My brain doesn't know what to do with this stuff.

The juxtaposition of Orangette's homey, unfussy food and the molecular gastronomers' futuristic, complicated compositions is startling. It's making me feel a bit unhinged. But it's also helping mold my own sense of my cooking style, which I've been thinking about a lot while developing dishes for Après. I want to bring out the essence of ingredients while giving our customers a flavor experience they probably wouldn't have at home, and serve food that's whimsical without being silly. But be warned, I borrowed a molecular gastronomy kit from someone and I've got a science experiment in the refrigerator right now...

Oh, radish!

I don't know why that posting title sounds funny to me, but it does. I have radishes on the brain. This is not a common problem for me; in fact, I can count the number of times I've really thought deeply about radishes on one hand. I don't like radishes whenever their presence is obvious. The best thing I've ever done with a radish is carve a mouse out of it. But this week I've been working on a radish dish for Après, and suddenly radishes seem a lot more interesting!

Here's how it happened: the other day I made some cultured butter, which I haven't tasted since last summer when I used to sell it at the Micro-Market. Of course we make butter around here all the time, but usually we don't go to the trouble of culturing it, since the cultured flavor gets lost when you use the butter for baking. Cultured butter is just about the tastiest thing in the universe. It has a slight tang, like sour cream, but with the perfect rich smoothness of butter. You make it just like you make yogurt or sour cream: you add a culture (a mixture of bacteria) to cream and let it grow, and the bacteria eat some of the milk sugars and produce fantastic flavors. In our case, we take the cultured cream and churn butter from it, and then we have cultured butter!

Since I had this cultured butter on hand, I was trying to think of a dish that would highlight it. Personally, I feel that the best thing to do with cultured butter is eat it straight up, off a spoon, but I don't think a lot of people are going to do that. I did some searches for appetizers that star butter, and I found one for radishes and butter: just spread butter on a raw radish, sprinkle with salt, and eat. Since I don't like radishes, I wasn't too excited to try it, but later that same day I was reading the blog Orangette (more on that later) and I saw a reference to exactly the same treatment of radishes and butter (apparently this is how French people eat radishes). So I got some radishes and we slathered a bunch of butter on them and ate them, and they tasted...pretty good! The butter tones down the radishes' peppery bite, and a little crunchy salt on top never hurts.

I figured I was on a roll, so I also tried another recipe for butter-braised radishes. I've never had a cooked radish before, and it turns out they're quite tasty--they lose their watery-ness and take on the hearty texture and earthy sweetness of other cooked root vegetables. The tasting crew here is divided over whether we like radishes better cooked or raw, but we are unanimous that we like them with butter! So we decided to let everyone judge for himself, and we're running an Après special called Radishes and Butter Two Ways. We hope some other people will give them a chance!

The rise of rhubarb

We've now had more than two consecutive sunny, warm days, so I'm declaring it spring. Plus, with the time change (not to mention the official first day of spring), it feels like the psychological darkness of winter is behind us. In case you were wondering, I am not a skier.

The only bad thing about warmer weather is that all our refrigerators started breaking: this past week we've had one broken ice machine, two broken refrigerators, a now a third refrigerator is acting funny. And every one of those was a separate service call, which kind of makes me want to go outside and bang my head against the brick wall.

To keep up with the weather, we're working on a new dessert for Après. It's time to phase out our citrus desserts, plus the apple dumpling (which really hasn't been in season for about five months, but cool weather always feels apple-y, so we did it). There's really only one spring fruit-like ingredient: rhubarb, one of the weirder dessert ingredients around. It's hard to be inspired by something that looks like celery and has a sour flavor and stringy texture. And yet, there is that amazing color...

To guide the development of our rhubarb dessert, I laid down two ground rules. First, the whole point of using rhubarb is that it's seasonal, so we are not going to pair it with non-seasonal ingredients, which includes strawberries (or, saints preserve us, raspberries, which won't be in season for months and months). Second, the final dish has to feature the appeal of rhubarb, which means we had to find a way to coax a nice flavor out of it without covering it up.

My initial thought was to dress up a rhubarb tartlet, which seemed classic and simple. I thought almonds might be a nice pairing, and I found a recipe for almond gelato which was essentially frozen almond paste--Jill's favorite food--so I figured that couldn't be a bad garnish. I made a nice delicate tart crust, and some pastry cream flavored with a dash of cardamom, but I was stumped on how to make the rhubarb into a pretty tart topping, since usually it breaks down into a stringy mush when it's cooked, and no matter how many warm childhood memories you have about rhubarb, stringy mush is not appetizing. I did some web searching and found a crazy recipe for cooking rhubarb stalks "sous vide", which is a technique used by fancy chefs like Thomas Keller to cook everything from vegetables to meats at a low, controlled temperature "without air" (basically sealed in a plastic bag, and placed in warm water bath). This allows delicate ingredients to retain their original shape while softening and cooking through, and it's super-easy if you own a temperature-controlled water bath. Which I don't. But I tried to approximate the method using a big pot of water and checking the temperature every few minutes, and it turns out that the pilot light on our stove does a perfect job of maintaining the water at the correct temperature for the rhubarb recipe.

Surprisingly, it worked great! I put rhubarb stalks in a ziploc bag with some water, sugar, and vanilla bean seeds and an hour later we had nice, soft rhubarb that held its shape and soaked up a little sweet vanilla flavor. When I put this in my tart shell on top of the cardamom pastry cream, and added a scoop of almond gelato on the side, it looked pretty good. Then we all grabbed spoons and tasted it, and there was an awkward moment while everyone basically said "huh." It wasn't bad, but it wasn't really good. We batted around ideas for a while--maybe the crust was too thick, or there was too much pastry cream, or the ice cream was overwhelming, or we needed a layer of rhubarb compote in the tartlet, but after half an hour, we came to the conclusion that it just didn't taste like much of anything. The components were all good, but the rhubarb flavor got swamped as soon as we tried it with anything else.

Then, as we were cleaning up from the taste test, we saw the ziploc bag with the rosy rhubarb poaching liquid in it, and we figured we might as well taste that (that is a good summary of one of my life's driving philosophies: might as well taste that). Bingo! It was fantastic! Like lemonade, but pinker! Like pink lemonade, but real-er pink! I drank a whole glass of it, and now we have a entirely new concept: rhubarb soup! I remembered a recipe by Pierre Hermé (whose cookbook jacket calls him "The Picasso of Desserts", which might win him the chef ego contest, although the competition is fierce) for strawberry-rhubarb soup, and I found some other ideas online to tweak my sous vide recipe to make the liquid come out as flavorful as possible. Now I'm working on the presentation and accompaniments: a scoop of homemade crème fraîche, a cardamom-almond lace cookie, and if all goes well we'll be debuting the dessert this week.

We got a nice review on one of Westword's blogs: http://blogs.westword.com/cafesociety/2010/03/sugar_high_apres_dessert_bar_a.php. Congrats to Travis for manning the ship during our first reviewer visit (that we know about)!

To close, I took a picture of a creation made by one of our servers who lent an able hand during an afternoon of marathon ice cream sandwich making. He couldn't bear to throw away the scraps of cookie and ice cream that were left, so he made himself a sundae (which is probably not going to appear on our menu, but you can always disassemble an ice cream sandwich to make your own version):