The Bread and the Knife
Page 15
Paging through the spiral-bound Volume 6 on that frigid January day, I felt something akin to wanderlust. The recipes adumbrated a world whose inhabitants sustained themselves on citrus air, ultrasonic fries, pineapple glass, spiced ash, fossilized salsify branch, and edible prune coals. It was slightly creepy that some instructional photographs in the other volumes featured syringes and blue-green surgical gloves, and that pasta in this alternate universe took the form of gel noodles extruded by a peristaltic pump, but I had been fascinated by the intersection of science and cooking since I received a chemistry set and an Easy-Bake Oven for Christmas when I was nine and attempted to use them together. In fact, that was my only faint similarity to Myhrvold, who had tried at the same age to flambé his family’s Thanksgiving turkey under the influence of The Pyromaniac’s Cookbook. I was soon to be harshly reminded that, among our many differences, he is both a trained scientist and a trained chef. (In the interstices of his Microsoft career, Myhrvold had found time to cook in some high-end restaurants and earn a diploma from the École de Cuisine La Varenne.)
In his book Stumbling on Happiness, Daniel Gilbert analyzes the ways in which we deceive ourselves about the future. We use our imaginations to look into time just as we use our eyes to look into space, he observes, warning that the mind’s eye can be tricked by a specimen of optical illusion when visualizing possible outcomes. Modernist Cuisine, whether intentionally or not, lays a number of traps for the imagination, and I blundered into every one.
First, I fell prey to the hyperreality of the photographs. Bob Tuschman, head of programming for the Food Network, described the secret of food porn as blowing up the image so that you can see its “pores,” evoking a primitive desire to “bring it back to your cave.” Modernist Cuisine elevates food porn to a new level, and the only way to slake the desire aroused by these photographs is to reproduce what is on the page. I misapprehended that since an image seemed so real I could taste it, it must be possible to make it. Second, I was duped by what I came to call the Dimensional Fallacy: because a recipe fits on a single page, it must take no time at all to execute. I discovered the hard way that it is an error of logic to assume that the amount of space occupied by two dimensions has anything to do with the amount of time occupied by four. These recipes took up so little room not because they were brief but because they were printed single-spaced in a minuscule font on a huge page with tiny margins. As a final snare, the compression of the language rivals that of the layout. The instructions are a model of clarity and concision, written in a scientific shorthand devoid of the usual explanations and encouragements. I should have realized I was looking not at recipes but at lab notes, and that my point of comparison should have been a textbook rather than a cookbook. In short, I should have taken Ferran Adrià’s introductory comment that the book is “not easy, yet clear” as a warning rather than as a gnomic pronouncement.
As yet happily unclear as to why the book was not easy, I became fixated on the adaptation of Adrià’s Mussels in Mussel Juice Spheres (Volume 4, page 191), which looked like crystalline jellyfish washed up on the beach after a storm. For days, I stared at the picture in a sort of trance as I painstakingly followed the recipe’s instructions in my mind. I could almost feel the orbs dissolve on my tongue, releasing the brine into my mouth. I told myself I experienced nearly as much satisfaction from going through the mental process as if I had actually done it, but I couldn’t banish the pesky image of someone confined to bed who thinks she can keep up her tennis game by practicing her serve in her mind. Who was I fooling? I was not going to purchase or contrive a sous-vide apparatus to prepare mussel jus from rock mussels, mollusks that an Internet search suggested I would find only in the Dravanian Forelands of an online role-playing game called Final Fantasy XIV. And in fact I had no idea what the final product of the spherification process would taste like. So I decided to find a recipe that used some of the space-age ingredients that appealed to the frustrated chemist in me but that I could actually execute in the real world.
In the end, I decided on Adrià’s Liquid Pimento Olives, which appear a few pages later. I wanted to try reverse cryospherification, and deconstructing and reconstructing an olive seemed doable. Even though I am not a martini drinker and had no use for pseudo-olives, they were at least theoretically edible, unlike the recipe for fake raw egg on the following page, perhaps intended as a (literal) magician’s gag. And they contained three of the mysterious powders I longed to use: sodium alginate, calcium lactate, and xanthan gum.
I read up on these a little, and only xanthan gum gave me pause. The product of fermenting sugar with Xanthomonas campestris, the mold that produces those nasty black spots on broccoli, xanthan gum is also used in wallpaper glue and oil drilling because of its frankly slimy properties. In fact, another modernist cooking manual warns, “adding too much xanthan gum can result in a texture and mouthfeel resembling mucus.” But Myhrvold reassures that this product of microbial fermentation is “just as natural as vinegar and yeast.” It seems silly to have gotten nervous about an ingredient that has since made its way onto The Great British Baking Show, but it would be several years before the passion for gluten-free baking brought xanthan gum out of the laboratory and onto the supermarket shelf beside the King Arthur flour. In any case, perhaps the lesson is that you can’t win. You think something is suspicious for one reason (nasty white chemical) and find out it’s actually suspicious for quite another (nasty black mold). As for sodium alginate (made of seaweed) and calcium lactate (those crystals that form on your cheese), they were clearly harmless.
Liquid Pimento Olive
Modernist Cuisine
(Adapted from Ferran Adrià)
INGREDIENT
QUANTITY
SCALING
Extra-virgin olive oil
500 g
100%
Thyme
20 g
4%
Orange peel, julienne
15 g
3%
1. Combine to make aromatic olive oil.
2. Reserve for later use.
INGREDIENT
QUANTITY
SCALING
Green olives, pitted
500 g
100%
Olive brine, from olives
200 g
40%
3. Blend in food processor to fine paste.
4. Press through fine sieve, and reserve 450 g of olive puree.
INGREDIENT
QUANTITY
SCALING
Calcium lactate
13.5 g
2.7%
(3%)*
5. Blend by hand with olive puree until completely dissolved.
INGREDIENT
QUANTITY
SCALING
Xanthan gum
(Texturas brand)
1.6 g
.32%
(0.36%)*
6. Blend gradually with olive puree.
7. Cast into hemisphere molds.
INGREDIENT
QUANTITY
SCALING
Piquillo pepper, cut in thin strips (store-bought)
15 g
3%
8. Place pepper strip on top, and carefully push into each hemisphere.
9. Freeze.
INGREDIENT
QUANTITY
SCALING
Sodium alginate (Algin, Texturas brand)
5 g
1%
Water
1 kg
200%
10. Disperse with hand blender, and refrigerate until needed.
11. Before use, blend until sodium alginate is completely incorporated.
12. Vacuum seal to remove accumulated bubbles.
13. Pour into bowl to make bath for setting olives.
14. Bring bath to simmer.
15. Remove each frozen hemisphere from mold, place on spoon, and tip gently into bath.
16. Set in bath for 3 min. Hemispheres will thaw into spheres, and skin will fo
rm.
17. Remove olive sphere from bath with perforated spoon.
18. Rinse sphere twice in cold water.
19. Repeat with remaining olive hemispheres.
20. Store spherified olives, refrigerated, in reserved aromatic olive oil.
*(% of weight of reserved olive puree)
Yield: 480 g
Day 1: Before beginning, I search the Internet for affordable molecular gastronomy ingredients. In the interest of economy, I decide to purchase a used Modernist Pantry kit on eBay, disregarding the recipe’s stipulation of Texturas brand xanthan gum and sodium alginate. This one-stop shopping option includes packets of all the chemicals I need (plus many I don’t) along with a special perforated spoon and a digital scale sensitive enough to measure dust. I should have heeded that the seller had opened exactly one of the envelopes (sodium alginate) before giving up; she was even throwing in a free twenty-five dollars silicone mold of the kind I needed for the olive spheres.
Day 2: While awaiting delivery, I prepare the aromatic olive oil. The process is suspiciously easy, and I have a feeling of foreboding that it is all downhill from here.
Day 3: Still awaiting delivery, I walk to Zabar’s to buy piquillo peppers, otherwise known as pimentos, and green olives. Thwarted in my attempt to collect olive brine with the olives I purchase, I am forced to buy a huge additional can just for the salt water. (No way am I jeopardizing this recipe by using the inferior canned olives themselves.) Weighing the olives and the brine discloses that the label vastly overrepresents the weight of the former and underrepresents the weight of the latter. This is probably not an isolated occurrence, but I doubt most people drain their canned food and compare the relative weight of the wet and dry contents. Even if they did, what recourse would they have for olives imported from Syria, which has more pressing concerns than customer-service complaints?
Day 5: The kit arrives late in the afternoon. I open it immediately and prepare the sodium alginate solution. An intensive Google search suggests that refrigerating for twenty-four hours will banish bubbles in lieu of the $700 chamber vacuum sealer hiding in Step 12.
Day 6: I haul out the ancient food processor the next day with a feeling of anticipation, but my confidence evaporates almost instantly when I begin to press the olive paste through a fine sieve. Instead of a glossy “puree,” only dun-colored water drips through. This can’t be right, so I switch to a slightly coarser sieve. The result looks thick and creamy, more like pea puree, but I am a bit concerned when the yield is at least four times the expected 450 grams. Referring back to the illustrated volume (I have been using the spiral-bound recipe book designed for the kitchen), I notice with a pang of dread a hand pouring green liquid into a mold. I try liquefying my puree with an immersion blender, but it refuses to approach the consistency in the picture. My misgivings deepen when I further thicken my puree with the xanthan gum, yielding a bowlful of wobbly olive batter, which I spoon rather than “cast” into the molds. The last step resembles a gluey game of Operation, where I use tweezers to place a tiny piece of pimento in the center of each circle. After putting my tray of fifteen olives into the freezer, I am left with enough mixture for hundreds more. As the days pass, my olive oil has darkened ominously while remaining stubbornly unaromatic.
Day 7: Significantly less optimistic, I return to the kitchen in the morning to heat the sodium alginate solution, immediately releasing all of the bubbles I sought to eliminate with refrigeration. Worse, the temperature of the solution refuses to rise above 185 degrees even after an hour on the stove. Some chefs say a simmer can be as low as 180 degrees, so I give up and lower the first suspiciously sturdy disk into the bath with the special perforated spoon and wait for it to blossom magically into a sphere. Nothing happens. I set the timer for one minute. Still nothing. Two minutes, three, four. Defeated, I fish it out, dunking it in two cold baths and letting it drain a moment. It resembles a slick, khaki-colored flying saucer. I bite down cautiously, and a rush of clear goo squirts from the middle, followed by a mouthful of curdled olive jelly. It is a good thing I am standing over the sink. I nibble the edge of a frozen disk, awful in a different way—dense and alkaline—before emptying the silicone tray and refrigerated puree into the trashcan. At least I can salvage the olive oil, since it tastes of … olive oil.
Post mortem: It was pretty easy to diagnose what went wrong. Although I had practically memorized the instructions, I’d missed a nearly invisible photo caption that read, “The ideal viscosity is that of thick cream.” I’d lost my nerve when what was essentially brine dripped from the sieve, thinking I was aiming for a vegetable puree rather than an “edible liquid.” (Am I wrong in thinking that the need to use “edible” in a cookbook is a red flag?) Perhaps I compounded my error by using generic xanthan gum and sodium alginate. And as for those mysterious reappearing bubbles in the sodium alginate solution, I must have overlooked somewhere in those 2,438 pages what I discovered too late elsewhere: that I was supposed to use distilled water. But in the final analysis, I was the victim of a chemical paradox: my mixture was too thick to round into a sphere. In any case, upon rereading my entries, I recognize a pattern all too familiar from diaries throughout history: the path from infatuation to disillusionment. As always, however, there are lessons to be gleaned from heartbreak. I had become so obsessed with producing something—anything—that would gain me access to this esoteric realm that I wasted a week of my life trying to produce a garnish for drinks I never intended to serve. What I lost sight of during the process was the most important ratio of all: that of effort to reward.
is for
Yquem
It is a truth universally acknowledged, that a divorced woman in search of a good husband must be in want of a life. That is to say, if you are to avoid repeating the mistakes you made the last time, you must learn how to live by yourself, to like your own company, and to stand on your own two feet, so that when you finally choose a mate, you will be “two solitudes that meet, protect and greet each other,” in Rilke’s lofty phrase, rather than a co-dependent mess. At least this is what I told myself when I found myself divorced and living in a shabby basement apartment in Brooklyn at thirty-one. I was so desperately afraid of being alone, so terrified that without someone to witness my existence I would actually die, that at least once an evening I would find myself with the phone in my hand about to call someone, anyone, to arrange a disastrous rendezvous. But I had a wise best friend and a good therapist, both of whom advised me that the only way out was through, and assured me that the existential terror would pass if I just sat still long enough to tolerate it. And so I folded myself up in a battered wing chair night after night, staring at the Duraflame log in the fireplace, smoking cigarettes and sipping Scotch until it was time to put myself to bed. Slowly, I learned how to live in my own skin.
After three seasons of introspection and enforced celibacy, I went to a New Year’s Eve party. The tarot-reading psychic in the cloakroom gave me a forgettable reading, then urgently whispered a piece of dubious advice in my ear as I stood to leave: “Wear pink underwear if you want to meet someone!”
All night I had been uncomfortably aware, each time I turned my head, of the stare of an intense-looking man in a cardigan. The cardigan somehow made the stare even more unsettling. He turned out to be a friend of the hostess, who called the next day, promising he wasn’t a serial killer and asking if it was all right to give him my number. What the hell, I thought. It was cheaper than buying all new underwear.
One thing I learned from the disastrous year that followed is that there is not as much correlation as there should be between the depth of your feeling for someone and how much he can make you suffer. You can know that he is all wrong for you, that you are temperamentally incompatible, you can even feel superior to him in just about every way, and still, if you are a romantic obsessive by nature, you can use him to make yourself miserable. I am like the little bird in Are You My Mother?, programmed to latch onto the next available
love object, no matter how inappropriate. So my nine months in front of the fire, while not exactly wasted, were not as salutary as I had hoped they would be.
When we had been dating for about two months, he asked me to go dancing. I hate dancing. I’m bad at it and, if still sober enough to be coordinated, I can never remember to smile and pretend I’m having a good time. But it was in that early stage of a relationship where you will (if you are me) seriously consider things like participating in a Harley rally when getting on the back of a motorcycle is one of the few things you have sworn never to do to in your life, so of course I agreed. After a few excruciating hours during which he repeatedly asked if my shoes were hurting, he invited me back to his apartment for the first time.
We stood for ages in the bitter March wind trying to find a cab. The tiny black Azzedine Alaïa knockoff that had seemed sexy in the dance club felt merely inadequate now. I was chilled to the bone by the time we arrived at his Greenwich Village apartment, which was hardly warmer than the street, but I was too vain to keep my jacket on and let him hang it in his frighteningly tidy closet. I followed him into the kitchen, but he told me to go sit on the couch and look pretty. Like all his compliments, this one had an irritating tinge of masculine condescension that I chose to ignore.
I looked around for a throw or even a few pillows to pile on myself for warmth, but the living room was a severely tailored, charcoal gray and black affair, relieved only by a stunning view of the Empire State Building. The upholstery on the sofa was stretched so tight you could bounce a quarter on it, and I noticed with amusement that the pillows actually buttoned up. I stepped out of my vertiginous heels and curled up in a corner of the couch, pulling my stretchy dress over my knees for warmth and piling the two pillows on my lap. At last he emerged, set a tray on the coffee table, and began lighting candles and adjusting dimmers with the touching finickiness of someone who hasn’t entertained in a long time. The tray held a slab of foie gras, pale pink and rimmed with bright yellow fat, studded with a black truffle. There were some triangles of toast in a linen-lined basket, which I was tempted to use as a hand warmer. And there were two delicate glasses and a half-bottle of Chateau d’Yquem 1985. Even I knew the name of the legendary dessert wine unanimously agreed to be the apotheosis of Sauternes.