chadzilla

revisiting the umami machine

While Chef K and I were organizing recipes for submission to Star Chefs Quick Meals, we focused on home kitchen appliances for inspiration... and one that is a fairly new-comer to the American kitchen...

The Combination Microwave.

Several brands have combination microwaves on the market as we speak.  Wal-Mart recently had an Emerson on sale for $70.  For those who don't know, a combination microwave is an appliance that looks pretty much like your average microwave oven but also has a heating element within to offer a combination of cooking methods... microwave and radiant heat.  That means it has the ability to heat food more quickly and simulaneously with microwave technology while allowing conventional heat (and convectional in some cases with the addition of an internal fan) for maillard reactions... i. e. browning.

This may seem of little interest for the professional chef... but look deeper.  The technology is very similar to units that Hitachi (picture above) was producing over 2 years ago in Japan.  I posted about it here.  Hitachi uses the dual-cooking methods to guide foods through the cooking process by closely monitoring the temperature ranges in which umami-rich amino acids thrive and die.  This is the same as the Japanese method for making dashi as the oven quickly takes food above the 50C temp (because we lose valuable inosinic and guanylic acids continuously below that mark) and keeps foods as long as possible below the 80C temp (because glutamine acid continues to increase as long as food is held below this mark).  Traditional dashi requires close monitoring of these temperatures coinciding with the addition and removal of the kombu and bonito flake.  The result is noticeably different from putting the ingredients in a pot of water and boiling them without concern of temperature or time.

This technology and information is not new, but very little has been done in the West to utilize it.  More accurate cooking methods such as sous-vide can offer more control if the end goal is known.  For now, I cannot help but be excited about combination microwaves.  It seems like another stepping stone laid down on the road to an umami rich American kitchen.  Americans love umami.  They just don't know it.  Japan has had this on the market for over 2 years, and all I want is one for my house that will work on American voltage.  Is that too much to ask?  How much longer will I wait?

And if there are any chefs out there who dismiss the microwave as an appliance not worthy of being used in a professional kitchen, I invite you to look into what Ferran Adria was doing at the 2008 Madrid Fusion... we are just barely tapping into this technology as a viable and unique cooking technique (the stuff that Adria revealled a couple of months ago has been under experimentation in his taller for over 2 years now).  Microwaves have been in most kitchens for decades, and we have used them for very little except heating coffee and making popcorn.  It's time to take another look.

nola news

There were 2 interesting food-related bits of news from New Orleans this week...

One was the 'almost' shooting of Chef Paul Prudhomme at the Zurich Classic golf tournament.  Prudhomme was reportedly setting up for a cooking demo for some of the golfers when a bullet pierced his white jacket and scratched his arm.  After examination, he continued on with the demo a few minutes later.  Police speculate that the shot was from a falling bullet after someone elsewhere fired a shot into the air.  Although this may seem strange to some, it rings familiarity with anyone who has lived in and around New Orleans.  If this scares you in any way, then do not allow yourself to be anywhere outside at midnight on New Year's eve when New Orleanians all over pull their guns out and fire shots into the sky... I witnessed this firsthand when bicycling home after closing the Italian restaurant I was working when I first moved to the Crescent City years ago... I never pedalled so fast in my life!

In the words of Capt. Charlie on the Wild Wild West Bank...

"I'm happy that the big man wasn't hurt. And; while the rest of the world was agast that this could occur at a major PGA tournament, the event made me homesick for my gunhappy, devil may care West Bank."

The other food-related story was the passing of Al Copeland from complications during his cancer treatment in Germany.  Copeland has been an eccentric public figure throughout my entire growing life in South Louisiana.  Most of the world knows him mainly as the founder of Popeye's Famous Fried Chicken and Biscuits.  He has always retained a name in the headlines for his tackiness... whether it involved warring with his neighbors over Christmas decorations in the name of the Christmas Spirit, painting the Landmark hotel pink and baby blue, his violent public feuds in ways that would have made the Godfather proud, or publicly battling with other local celebs such as Anne Rice.  They don't make them like that anymore.  Rest in peace and chicken grease.

nostalgia

There is always a reassurance when your thoughts seem to come from the collective consciousness, like an affirmation that you are somehow on a wavelength with other great minds somewhere.  Sometimes someone will blog about something that you were just talking about or playing with in the kitchen.  Maybe it's just that new car syndrome... you buy a new car then suddenly you notice every other vehicle of the same make and model on the street when before you didn't... simply because you were not paying attention.

That was the coincidental feeling I had when clicking onto and reading the NY Times article on Yoshoku by Norimitsu Onishi yesterday.  It was basically an examination of western food (our foods) as interpreted by the Japanese chef.  This yoshoku style (or Western food) has become as nostalgic for Japanese who grew up eating it as our American bastardations of other ethnic foods have become for us.  Last night I made gringo tacos at home (which also coincidentally was the feature of the quick fire challenge on the Top Chef episode) because I was craving those flavors and textures from my childhood.  Crispy perfectly-fabricated taco shells, ground meat with ketchupy taco sauce, cheddar and mozzarella cheese, sliced up iceberg lettuce seasoned with Heinz salad vinegar... would any Mexican even relate to such a taco.  I mentioned pasta with ketchup in my crab rangoon post.  What about the salad with corn flakes I had in Taiwan over a year ago?  Mayonnaise with jimmies?

Onishi traces the trend in Japan to early relations with the western world in the late 1800's.  While other Asian countries such as China rejected western ideas and foods, Japan embraced them and even believed that eating a western diet would cause the Japanese people to grow taller.  The Japanese emperor suggested that the average short height of his people was due to a diet based on rice and not on potatoes, wheat, and other grains.  (This world view of America being a meat and potatoes country was always difficult for me to grasp years ago since I grew up in a predominantly rice-eating area of the US.)  Just like the early influx of Chinese and Italian cuisine in America in an era when the culture was very different gave us ample time to completely morph these new dishes into something a Chinese or Italian would scoff at, the Japanese with their lack of true western ingredients and understanding of it had created western dishes that really do not make much sense to the western tongue.  The only other Asian countries that have yoshoku-style restaurants are Taiwan and South Korea due to their influence from Japan.  This clears up a lot of the confusion I experienced from eating western dishes in Taiwan.  I'm still not really sure what was on that pizza.  Even my inlaws do a version of spaghetti in their restaurant that had minced beef and ketchup over long pasta and is garnished with limes.  It took me quite some time to grasp that one (not that I have any sort of grip on it now).  Part of me wanted to pick up a pan and show them what spaghetti is supposed to be, but the ketchup version is what they relate to.  Besides, what would I have shown them anyway... my own American bastardation of the Italian staple?  It's such a vicious cycle.

Perhaps the focus on these bastardations or interpretations of other cuisines is simply the next step from the retro-cuisine trend that had pastry chefs making twinkies and allowed meatloaf to appear on fine dining menus.  The beauty of it is that it removes the stigmas from foods that were previously shunned by fine dining chefs.  It's just like music... in the nineties, no one would even admit to ever listening to 80's pop music or metal and now there are entire radio stations dedicated to bringing it all back.  It is really all about nostalgia and whatever the current generation perceives as sentimental.  I'm just glad I can finally dig out my Motley Crue and Poison CD's without any loss of dignity.

back out to play...

It's been too long caught up in all the holiday mad-house craziness.  Finally, with our Asst. Restaurant manager coming in to eat with her parents from Sweden, I had the chance to get back to food play.  The dinner was simple with just 3 planned special appetizers then their menu choices of the rest.  I thought about doing Swedish meatballs, but digressed.

First was a sample of Bellota Iberico jamon with honeydew melon confit and balsamic syrup.  I haven't mentioned the full story of this ham before.  Chef K called one of our special importers for a leg of the Bellota (which was the most expensive and revered jamon of the recently... actually not much more than a month now... made available in the US market Spanish jamons).  We were the first to request it, so good call Chef K.  That stuff is like pig heaven on a plate.  Unfortunately, our manager's boyfriend cut the fat off of his piece before he ate it... his loss.

Next up was a salad of pea tendrils with wakame dressing, sweet soy, toasted shiso seed, and a warm garnish of cheesy mushroom and crab rangoon (because I have a one track mind).  The rangoon seemed like a good salad element since warm melted cheese is always good on a salad.

My next course allowed me to finally utilize fried methocel batter on a menu.  I dipped skewers of monkfish nuggets into a batter made up almost purely of...

Lobster roe and fat!  I scooped out the black raw roe and green tomalley from 12 2# lobster's heads after blanch-steaming them for our brown-butter poached lobster dish on the dinner menu.  I added a little lemon juice, worcestershire, and water to the lobster offal and blended it before adding the tapioca starch, xanthan, and methocel SG A16.

The batter was a dull army green, then turned orange after frying.

Again, the fried batter texture is not crispy with the small amount of starch added... it's more like... sort of like stuffed fried tofu skin.

This also is a play on the term 'poor man's lobster' in reference to monkfish.  The fried fish texture is exactly like lobster, and you simultaneously get all of the rich creamy roe flavor at the same time.

I decided to base the other dish elements on buffalo wings by adding compressed celery (texture lightened with a simple syrup made from envision so that it would not be sweet) and blue cheese dressing.

The red sauce is... buffalo soja sauce.  I took our old recipe for soja (made with ketchup, soy sauce, and mounted with butter) and added chile paste to it.  All apologies to Bob Marley, but I could not resist the name... in fact, I composed the entire dish this way just to use buffalo soja on a menu.

This was my first time using envision.  It did not dissolve as readily as sugar (although it is a sugar), but once it did the syrup was the same consistency and had the stickiness of sugar.  When tasting it, you get only subtle flashes of sweetness.  This is definitely an interesting product for getting the effect that only sugar can offer without the sickening sweetness.

rangoon

It's funny how things change... or at least our perspectives.

You spend most of your career studying different food cultures and become obsessed with what is authentic and what's not.  You cringe at American bastardations of other cuisines such as Italian and Chinese (to name the 2 most bastardized).  It seems that the earliest foreign food cultures to exist in the USA are today the most mutated.  It's so much easier to go out and find authentic Japanese or even moreso, Vietnamese, than to find a real Chinese restaurant... and by that I mean one that doesn't include dishes twisted or corrupted to appeal to the American tongue.  I guess that's because Chinese food is so much older in America and that was in the late 1800's and early 1900's when we weren't so open-minded as we are today eating everything in site.

Now, I embrace our American bastardations... why not?  There is a certain nostalgia in some of those dishes and enough time has passed to make them immortal in themselves.  One of the best examples is crab rangoon in Chinese restaurants.  I researched the dish a few years ago as a curiosity.  It really does not exist in Chinese cuisine (just like chop suey)... only in American Chinese Restaurants.  In fact, it would be fun to do an entire dinner based on refined versions of ABC dishes.

Crab rangoon is in its simplest form... crabmeat and cream cheese sealed in a wonton and fried.  I used an 'open-faced' version last night that was actually an idea from 3 years ago.  Instead of cream cheese, I used mascarpone.  I sauteed wild mushrooms in sesame oil and mushroom soy sauce and creamed it with the mascarpone as a sauce.  The lump crabmeat was quickly stir-fried with garlic, shallot, and cilantro.  To make it even more interesting and to compliment the deep earthiness (hello! umami!) brought in by the addition of mushroom, I smoked it with wood and 5 spice under glass to send to the table.  This is an easy holiday family-friendly 2 bite offering.

Doing this dish again has reminded me to take yet another look at bastardations and how much a part of our culture they are... and we are still bastardizing food!  We rock, team America!  Don't feel too bad... if you've ever had Western food in Asia they do a great job of bastardizing our foods as well... like ordering pasta with marinara and the red sauce ends up being ketchup.  Easy mistake, right?

food waste

After years in this food industry, it's not hard to become de-sensitizied to the sight of massive amounts of food being thrown away.  Well, you do not become totally dis-heartened, but maybe you just get used to it.  The basic argument is always that restaurants and other food service establishments will not donate their left-over food product because of liability issues.  Think about that when you go out to your Easter buffet and load your plate up with more than you can eat.

This fact was brought to our attention again lately by a member of our staff, Ms. Bertha Corbin.  Aside from being a great Mississippi southern-style cook, she took a few days off this week to lobby for change in the Florida State Legislature.  She and about 8 other members of a Miami Homeless charity group went knocking on the doors of most of the state's representatives to push for the passing of a good Samaritan bill brought about by an 11 year old boy named Jack Davis.  The story goes that Jack was eating at a buffet with his family and was told to take as much food as he wanted before the buffet shut down... and that afterwards, most of this food was just going into the garbage.  They explained to him further that this food could not be given away or donated because the restaurant could get sued for food poisoning if someone got sick.  Seeing the obvious lack of sense in this situation, he started pushing to get the law changed.

We feel very proud that Ms. Bertha took the initiative to go out and change this wasteful legal situation.  After speaking to every politician on the list, her group also was present at the voting and the Jack Davis bill was signed into law!  The bill basically redefines restaurant food product in such a manner that it protects the donating establishments from any liability under law.  While we have just watched this happen and scraped out many a pot and pan into the trash for so many years, an 11 year old boy and a small group representing the interests of the homeless went out and made a difference.  Thank you and all who did something other than accept the current situation by donating your time and energy to something that will make a huge difference in so many lives.

acai

Sorry for the lack of post-worthy material (and lack of posts in general).  We just broke records for breakfast covers as well as enduring all day mayhem during this Spring Break period (which will roughly last for the next 10 days or so).  There are many sides to a chef's 'job' and knowing how to cook and exhibiting creativity is only a part of that job.  The rest of it is knowing how to get a kitchen full of 20 cooks or so to all flow cohesively and function like a well-oiled machine.  It means constantly keeping people in check from the line to the waitstaff to the food runners to the beverage manager to stewarding to anyone else who steps into your territory.  This is the sort of thing that makes 'chefs' choke on competition reality shows... unless you are eliminated for your cooking skills or knowledge which means you shouldn't even be there in the first place.

So what better to post about during this period of massive time and energy consumption?

Acai berries!  (Pronounced uh-SAH-ee)  One of the great superfoods of the world as Chef K pointed out to me quite some time back when he was researching superfoods for a Heart Association dinner.  Acai berry is one of those natural miracle foods that can supposedly do wonders for your health.  The Mona-Vie brand is a popular blend.  It's difficult to find pure acai unless you live in Brazil, and getting a great blend is an art in itself.  So how does the Mona-Vie taste... intense!  It's one of those substances that gets your body humming after ingesting a small amount, and I honestly have not felt that kind of 'uneasiness' since eating pure bee pollen in Santa Fe years ago.  I don't know if these foods commonly cause this reaction in people or if my body has a natural aversion for anything too good for me... maybe I should just stick to Amstel Light which gets me humming later in the day.

Anyway, we have a case of these bottles (not counting the one I brought home) and look forward to adding some gelling agents to them and incorporating them into dishes some time after the Spring Break holiday.

sous-vide magic

This is a request for feedback.

It seems that sous-vide cooking is becoming more financially accessible.  After following a link on Food for Design to Wired Magazine for an article on Nathan Myhrvold to Auber Instruments and finally to Fresh Meals Solutions, I was looking at a temperature control device for $100 that converts a basic rice cooker (no fuzzy logic because it won't work) into a water bath for sous-vide cooking that is accurate to 1%.

Its called Sous-Vide Magic.  After the purchase of a cheap large rice cooker, you can begin cooking sous-vide for well under $200.  Add on a nice food-saver and you are still well in budget for home use or a small restaurant with a humble capital list.

My big question is... has anyone out there used this device, and how well does it work.  It could open the doors for a lot of possibilities when you compare it to the $900 plus list price of a Polyscience thermocirculator.  This was inevitable.  It is simply a device that measures temperature and controls power for heating to maintain a constant temperature... how difficult and expensive is that to manufacture anyway?  Add on some sort of motor or pump and you have a thermocirculator.

messing with methocellulose?

Linda at Playing with Fire and Water posted a Methocellulose Primer recently which is a great summarization of the various types, manufacturer information, and applications.  Save it, print it, hang it on your wall for reference!

corn people

My first real awareness to a 'corn diet' was from reading "The Omnivore's Dilemma" by Michael Pollan.  It was one of the unexpected realities that I walked away from while reading it... especially in contrast to an Asian cultural background as I read it while Ming and I were in Taiwan visiting family.  It highlighted a fact that if any Americans are not aware of now, they soon will be.  I have not seen the movie 'King Corn,' but it looks like it can offer the same publicity as 'Super-Size Me' did for previously available books such as 'Fast Food Nation.'  It it a testimony to the fact that Americans are made up of 2/3 corn.

So what in the hell is so bad about corn?  It helped the first American colonials to survive after being shown how to grow it by the Native Americans.  They ate it at the first Thanksgiving, right?  Corn tastes good and is more American than apple pie.  We are truly a 'corn-bread nation.'

Part of the highlighted problem is that we have based our diet around one single plant... just like our society is dependent on one single fossil fuel.  Instead of becoming more diverse in our system of nourishment, we have tunneled ourselves into one big ole corn hole.  We use corn to feed the livestock that supplies us with meat everyday... the big 3 American proteins beef, poultry, and pork... all fed on corn.  Cows cannot even sufficiently digest corn, but they are corn-bred because we have mountains of corn piled up.  Corn is further processed into the basic ingredients that all processed packaged items and fast food menus are made of.  Colas and sodas commonly nick-named sugar water are in actuality corn water.  HFCS makes its way onto almost every label on every package on our shelves and coolers.

So if cows ate grass, wouldn't we all be made of grass?  Not exactly.  Aside from being present in everything we eat, corn molecular structure is based on a 4 carbon molecule instead of the more common 3 carbon molecule.  This is a corn adaptation that allows the plant to photosynthesize by maximizing its carbon dioxide intake while minimizing its water loss due to evaporation.  Corn doesn't pick and choose carbon like most plants and intake a sizeable amount of not-so-popular carbon 13 isotopes.  Once cows eat corn they contain carbon 13 isotopes, then we eat the beef and contain carbon 13 isotopes.  When corn is processed into many of the disguises that exist on the ingredient labels of packaged foods, those foods contain carbon 13 isotopes that we in turn ingest as well.  We are carbon based life forms so this is a very important consideration in our diets.  Eons after we die, if someone digs up our remains and puts us under an electron microscope, they will see carbon 13 isotopes (ever heard of carbon dating?).  This isotope is part of the permanent fingerprint of corn.  We have more corn in our bodies than the people of Mexico who have integrated corn into almost every meal of their daily diets!

It's all a real shame too.  I love corn in its pure undisguised form.  I love corn cobs in my seafood boils.  I love corn tortillas and maque choux.  I love popcorn.  I love grilled corn with butter.  I even love grits and polenta.  It's a real shame... like a relationship gone sour by an overly dominating partner.  Like Edna Lewis said about grits in response to the many non-traditional grit dishes chefs were playing with years ago... "people should just leave grits alone."  We should all just leave corn alone too.