WATER DISPERSION

So we went to New York and, among other things, we ate at WD-50, home of Wylie  Dufresne’s brand of molecular gastronomy, though he prefers not to call it that. The restaurant is in a part of the Lower East Side where not so long ago no sane person would dare set foot.  Now it’s a desirable area and there were a bunch of bars and restaurants near to WD-50 that looked very inviting.

WD-50 itself was austere but very welcoming, especially the staff, and our waiter was very keen to know if we were allergic to anything: the first time I’ve ever been asked that in a restaurant.  It was tempting to say, “Only to deconstruction,” but I resisted.

It seemed that everyone around us was having the tasting menu.  Call me a fool, but I never enjoy tasting menus.  They seem to contain the components of a meal without being an actual meal, as if you went to see a band play and instead of performing actual whole songs, they just played tiny, one minute snatches of their greatest hits. Ok, no doubt some bands do precisely that.

So the Loved One and I each had a starter and a main course (not being huge fans of dessert) and we were glad we did, because looking around at the other tables, it seemed as though the menu-tasters were being served small smears of something or other on tiny plates.

For starters we had aerated foie with plum jam and sliver of pickled beet, and  peekytoe crab in a hotdog bun.  Then there was duck breast with black sesame dumplings, and Iberico pork with spaetzle.  In each case there were plenty of other ingredients too.  I didn’t take pictures of the food because I didn’t want to appear like a rube, or worse still like a blogger, but the Internet shows that others have had no such inhibition. 

It was absolutely great.  I don’t know if this is a measure of whether we chose badly or well, but our meal lacked most of the knee-jerk molecular bells and whistles, and was decidedly light on the liquid nitrogen and the spherification.  But the one thing that absolutely stood out - and it was a small thing in its way - the peekytoe crab came with “salt and vinegar chips,” miniature potato chips the size of a cornflake and so rich and subtle in flavor and texture that you wanted to eat a pound of them.  I couldn’t help thinking that there are chefs in the world who could base entire careers on those things.

Actually, one of the most impressive things abut WD-50 was that you could peer into the open kitchen and there, quite visible was Wylie Dufresne, working steadily and unobtrusively.  It’s always good to know that the big name chef is actually in the kitchen, and not off doing some reality TV show.  And best of all, he didn’t come out and work the room for applause, the way certain celebrity chefs insist on doing.  

But if you want evidence of just how far and wide this whole molecular business has gone, on our last night, wandering happily and without great expectations around the Flatiron District, we happened to find an appealing looking restaurant called Gravy.  We knew nothing about it but I now know that it describes itself as the “first New Southern restaurant in New York City.”  And here, as well as the grits and the gumbo there were some decidedly molecular touches.  The crab bisque came with a fennel foam, the Long Island duck came with an egg cooked sous vide.  

Both foam and egg (and indeed the bisque and the duck) were perfectly good but you couldn’t help thinking they were the modernist equivalents of the carved raddish and the tomato rose: fancy little touches that didn’t have much to do with the real business of the food.  None of this, I hastily add, applies to the cooking of Wylie Dufresne.  When he cooks, he seems to really mean it.

MAGIC MEN

Ever since I wrote about Ricky Jay, Herman Boaz, and Charles Dickens and his trick of cooking hot pudding in a hat, I’ve been thinking about magic and cookery.  They both involve some of the same things: transformation, surprise, delight, the question “How the heck did they do that?” 

Of course this doesn’t fit with “the freshest ingredients simply cooked” trope as popularized by Alice Waters et al.  Many of us like to think that given a great piece of sea bass we too could cook it simply.  We want our chefs to have skills and dexterities that we don’t. 

As it happens Wylie Dufresne, in conversation with Anthony Bourdain and David Chang in the launch issue of Lucky Peach magazine, seems to agree with me.  “Ingredient-driven food.  What the fuck does that mean?  … Get good ingredients and cook it.  It’s called cooking.  Are you crazy?  Who’s like 'I’ve got some shitty stuff let’s cook it?’ … Ingredient-driven doesn’t mean anything.  That’s what good cooking is  ... Come on, do something to it!  Cooking is a skill.  It’s a craft.  It involves a lot of steps.  At restaurants of a certain caliber, all the ingredients are going to be good.  So why don’t we talk about what people are doing with those ingredients?”  

Well in fact I think I have been in some restaurants where they said I think 'I’ve got some shitty stuff let’s cook it?’  But his point is sound.  I think he’s saying we should talk about the magic, not about the hat.

I’ve also been thinking about Arthur C. Clarke’s line, “Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic,” which for some reason is described as his “third law.”  It strikes me as a remark rather than a law, and in any case I think it not exactly true. Technology’s resemblance to magic isn’t based on how advanced it is, but rather on how ignorant the perceiver is.   If you know about light and lenses and exposure and pixels, then a camera isn’t a magical instrument.  If you don’t, then maybe it is.  If you absolutely don’t know how to boil an egg, then a boiled egg is going to seem astounding.  And I admit that the very idea that beating eggs and oil together will eventually give you mayonnaise still strikes me as just amazing.  The fact that even I can do it seems more amazing still.  Though admittedly I use a food processor which Julia Child sneers at, and says requires no culinary skill whatsoever.  But somehow for me that doesn’t make it any less magical.  Of course the best-known food processor in Europe is the Magimix.

I can only imagine what Julia Child would have thought about cooking with a sous vide machine.  I imagine she’d be against it.  But here’s David Chang celebrating the joys of sous vide in his cookbook Momofuku, “If you know what temperature you want the thing to be, just cook it at that temperature for long enough to bring the whole thing up to that temperature and presto! It’s like magic: you’re not sitting there poking or prodding the meat or worrying that it’s rare or raw or overcooked.”

Of course you might argue that the poking and the prodding is where some of the magic lies.  In this case the magic may be in knowing what temperature you want the thing to be.  Certainly sous vide machines doesn’t seem very magical in themselves, just a hot water bath with a damn good thermostat.  The vide (vacuum) part simply involves sealing the ingredients in an airtight bag.  Or maybe the magic is in thinking to do it in the first place.

I see that earlier this year, for Pancake Day, my boys Bompas and Parr, the Jellymongers, launched a magic kit (described as “a box of food and magic”), in collaboration with Tate and Lyle Golden Syrup: exploding and levitating cans, glowing and gilded pancakes, that kind of thing.  And they did a performance at the Magic Circle HQ, which seems a bit surprising.  I thought the Magic Circle were a bit sniffy about outsiders encroaching on their patch.  But apparently not.

Not having access to the magic set, and frankly not being that big a fan of Golden Syrup, I searched for some magical food I could make for myself.  The easiest seemed to be to make food glow, not least because all it requires is a black light and a bottle of tonic water. Tonic water contains quinine, though not nearly as much as it used to (fear of hairlessness, I guess, and a very reasonable fear given my own experience with anti-malarial tablets), but that’s the magic ingredient, and it does indeed glow under ultraviolet light without you having to do anything to it whatsoever.

But in fact what you're actually looking at above is jellied tonic water. With Bompas and Parr in mind I made some jelly, using tonic water and Rose’s lime juice, and once it was set I sprinkled a few blueberries on top.  I may be easy impressed but I thought this looked pretty cool.  You could of course argue that you’d have much the same visual effect with a gin and tonic and a black light, which was precisely why I added the blueberries.

Flush with this success I boiled some potatoes, imagining I might end up with a plateful of glowing spuds, and to me they did look pretty amazing while they were boiling.

         But once they were cooked they looked pretty much like any other potato, even under a black light.  I did wonder if they’d taste incredibly bitter because of the quinine but in fact they tasted rather sweeter than usual, and were perfectly edible.

         Next I tried boiling rice in tonic water.  Disappointment ensued.  It looked like nothing while cooking, didn’t glow when cooked, and tasted pretty much like vomit, so much worse than you’d imagine a mouthful or rice and tonic water would taste. 

         One could spoil a lot of food this way, but I’m thinking a bit more experimentation with absorbent vegetables mightn’t come amiss, something that really soaks up water; mushrooms, courgette, boiled onions.  The possibilities aren’t quite endless but I haven’t given up yet.

Finally something else from David Chang.  The first issue of Lucky Peach is the ramen issue, a subject that evidently fascinates him a lot more than it does me, though his fascination is in itself fascinating, and I’m certainly a good deal wiser having read the issue. The magazine contains recipes, and in some ways reading a chef’s recipe is a bit like discovering how a magician does a trick.  Chang gives his own recipe for salt cod omlet, as cooked in Roxario’s, a restaurant in San Sebastian.  He has to guess how it’s done because the eponymous Roxario wouldn’t let him into the kitchen to see exactly how she did it.  She evidently wanted to keep a few tricks up her sleeve.