The pictures and videos below are from a reception that the Modernist Cuisine team hosted as part of the International Food Blogger’s Conference.   Needless to say, this is the most sophisticated kitchen on earth, and as a food geek, I was in heaven.  Click through for more photos and video.

[Click the picture to view full-size] This panorama gives you a sense of the kitchen’s layout.  All of the stations are on wheels and the whole kitchen can be rearranged as the team focuses on different projects. 

In this video clip, CEO and King of the Food Geeks Dr. Nathan Myhrvold discusses the decision to not dumb down the book to cover only the equipment you’re likely to have in your home kitchen.

[Click the picture for the full-size image (so you can read the labels)]  This is the Modernist Cuisine kitchen’s idea of a spice cabinet.  Many of the products are available through the website www.chefrubber.com

A centrifuge is used here to separate solids from liquids and clarify sauces and stocks.  The green bottle is finely-blended raw peas that have separated into solids and pea water.

In this video, Chef Chris Young talks about the benefits of having a kitchen without customers.  The unique design of the Modernist Cuisine kitchen allows the staff (up to 36 people at certain points in the book’s development) to focus on research and testing of new recipes and techniques. 

You’re looking at the world’s only deep-fried watermelon chips.  I have no idea how they managed to deep fry watermelon, but I promise that it’s a dangerous proposition if attempted incorrectly.  The chips were light and delicious, with a recognizable hint of caramelized watermelon flavor.

Those look like beautiful cherries, don’t they? They’re actually made of foie gras.  And yes, they were delicious.

Chefs plate a small bite of horse mackerel sashimi with ginger and plum, proving that not all of the recipes require a particle accelerator.

My favorite dish of the night’: "tongue and cheek pastrami and rye”.  A thin slice of sous vide smoked Wagyu beef cheek is served with thinly-shaved tongue and delicate rye chips.  But, what makes this dish spectacular is the beef marrow mousseline (shown being shot out of a CO2 charger).  The mousseline is like the richest, fattiest mayonnaise you could imagine, except it’s made from sous vide egg yolks and bone marrow, and it is served warm. 

The frozen pistachio “cream” (ie. pistachio ice cream) alone is worth the price of the book.  As you can see from its beautiful glossy sheen, the ice cream was creamy and incredibly smooth.  What makes this dish really incredible is that the ice cream is made only from pistachios, emulsifiers and sugar.  No milk. No Cream. No eggs.  That’s right, it’s vegan!

And, for a little whimsy, they made olive oil and vanilla bean gummy worms.

And finally, I was thrilled to get a picture with Nathan.  See that grin on my face?  I kept it for days.

For more information on the book, check back here and also be sure to visit the official site for the project, www.ModernistCuisine.com. 

If you want to keep up with the conference, just keep hitting refresh.

Thursday

The conference unofficially began on Thursday evening.  A small group of bloggers and real journalists were invited to the Intellectual Ventures lab – the one responsible for producing the Modernist Cuisine cookbook that will change the world upon its release in December. 

I’ll be dedicating upcoming posts to the tour of the lab and the details we know about the book, but in short, this was the most exciting night of my life, short of certain sexual milestones. 

Friday

Friday evening, IFBC threw a great kickoff reception at Hotel Monaco.  The highlight of the evening was a keynote discussion with Morgan Spurlock.  Here’s a little clip:

Saturday – Day 1

The first session of the morning is The Art of Recipe Writing, paneled by these lovely and accomplished people:

• Amy Sherman (moderator), food writer and recipe developer. Author of Williams-Sonoma New Flavors for Appetizers: Classic Recipes Redefined and the blog Cooking with Amy
• Dianne Jacob, best-selling author of “Will Write for Food.“
• Kristine Kidd, cookbook author, blogger, and former food editor at Bon Appétit

Audience – when choosing a recipe to blog, consider your audience.  Is this the type of dish that your readers want to make?  Is the recipe presented with enough description?  Is it too challenging?

Voice – Develop your personal style of writing, and be consistent.  When someone has been reading your blog for a while, they should be able to identify you from someone else. 

Measurements – Include more than one measurement in your recipes.  For example, say “1 large onion diced, about 1 cup.”

Salt – There’s a debate on the panel about how to specify salt.  To taste? Specific quantity?  Personally, I prefer salting to taste.  But, some people under salt their food and, as a result, don’t like the dish. 

Ingredients – List your damned ingredients in their order of use!  Also, recognize that your readers treat an ingredient list as a shopping list.  They don’t buy 2 cups of onion.

Punctuation – There is a violent disagreement about the use of semicolons, commas and paragraph breaks.  Diane Jacob believes that semicolons are pretentious.

Time – Think about including the working time along with the total time.  You may turn your readers off from a recipe if the time reads “3 Hours”, though the actual working time might only be 15 minutes.

Links – Use links to explain concepts that may need description for your readers.  Links to articles on Foodista.com and rouxbe.com are great resources, for example.

Going pro – What happens if you’re contacted by corporate or editorial clients?  Well, this can be a big pleasure from blogging.  And, this can lead to moving beyond blogging and into a professional realm.  So, how do you do it?

• Maintain an online portfolio of recipes
• Join a professional organization, like IACP
• Give yourself the title of “Recipe Developer”
• Network!

There aren’t any credentials for being a recipe developer, so it’s OK to present yourself that way.  If you’re trying to go pro, it’s great to hang out with bloggers, but start networking with the pros too (ex. IACP). 

Don’t give recipes away for free!  Although it may be very flattering to be asked to contribute your recipe to some site or book with a ton of exposure, if you’re giving your recipe away for free you’re undercutting everyone out there who makes their living by developing and selling recipes.

Also, don’t be afraid to negotiate.  At Bon Appétit, for example, they will pay you higher rates if you’ve contributed many recipes over time.

Testing recipes  – How many people have your recipes tested [by someone else] before putting them on the blog (show of hands reveals exactly none).  However, when you’re writing for a magazine, the recipes have to work.  Even on your blog, it is essential that your recipes work. 

Advantages of blogs over printed media:

• Include as many photos as you like
• Blog seasonally – magazines have a 6-month delay to print
• Link to details.  Making something complicated?  Someone else has probably already broken down the sub-steps.

How to avoid embarrassing yourself:

• Don’t include ingredients that you forget to use
• Don’t write recipes that don’t work
• Print out your recipes, test them, and check off ingredients and steps
• If you call for prep’d ingredients (1 cup potatoes diced), you don’t need to reiterate the prep in your steps
• Don’t assume that people have all the equipment or knowledge that you do

About copyright and attribution: Be honest and accurate.  If your recipe was inspired by someone else’s, just give attribution.  If you change some part of the recipe, yes, legally, it is your recipe.  But basically, don’t be a dick.

The ingredients list on its own, is not copyrightable.  However, if the recipe is wrapped by a heading or a story, or if your recipe is in a collection (like a cookbook) it may have some copyright protection.

Common sense in recipes – There was a time when cookbooks assumed you knew how to cook.  They didn’t have to explain what poach, fold, julienne, etc. was.  Then, at some point, recipes became more standardized, and more explained.  Now, there is some backlash.  Some writers are saying “we have dumbed down recipes and turned people into technicians to the point that they don’t have confidence or intuition.”  Has the pendulum swung to far?

“Recipe called for ‘toss the salad in a bowl’ and a student asked "’how far away from the bowl do I need to stand’?””  Oy.

Question – How do you gauge yields, since everyone has a different appetite? 
Choose a personal style.  The current guidelines at Bon Apetit suggest a protein portion of 4-6 oz.  But, you can also offer a starter/entrée size (ex. serves 4 as a starter or two as an entrée.)  Or, state “makes 2 servings plus leftovers”.

First session is over.  10 minute break!

Session 2:

Next up, we’ll learn about this “social media” thing I’ve been hearing so much about.

Important terms.  And no, “hits” isn’t an important metric.

To track your blog on sites like Alexa.com, and compare it to other sites.

How Google determines your relevance – over 200 factors, including a match between your page title and the search term, how frequently you update, etc.

It’s hard to make money on your blog.

Joy Victory from WordPress.com just announced a new feature coming on wordpress.com…

Foodpress!  Coming in October.  I can’t wait to hear more!

Really great session on how to use keywords. If you’re writing about (or thinking of writing about) corn, go check out Google Insights.  Look for the keywords related to corn, and look for other trending topics.  Then, make sure to use those words in:

• The first sentence of your post
• Subtitles
• photo captions
• links
• and the URL to the blog post

Next up, Urbanspoon!

The keys to Urbanspoon’s success:

• Leveraging SEO
• Keeping a very clean site design
• Focusing on restaurants by neighborhood, not by city.

Other than that, it’s pretty much a rundown of what Urbanspoon is and does.

Amazing graph – this is how fast the term “food blog” is growing relative to everything else!

Interesting comment from Joy Victory, WordPress.com Editorial Czar: People like to comment on posts on Twitter far more than on the built-in comments system.

From WordPress – The first three things you should do for a successful blog:

1. Have a niche, and be specific.  Don’t try to be all things to all people. 
2. Keep perspective.  It takes a long time to build a big group of followers.
3. Update often.  That helps both search engines and your readers.

From Urbanspoon

1. Be specific
2. Link a lot

From Foodista – know what you want to get out of it?  Do you want 1M page vews per month and make a living on advertizing?  To you want to become a professional food writer?  Do you want to support a particular restaurant?  Or, do you want it just to be an expression of your passion.

Comment from a representative of Saveur: put your contact info on your blog!  They’d love to get in touch with you!

Next Up: Kathleen Flinn – Writing with all five senses

She passed lemons around the room.  Here comes something philosophical.  She’s asking us to describe a lemon, without using the word “lemon”.  Here’s my attempt, which would have passed in 10th grade English.

Imagine the smell of a freshly cleaned summer house, with a gentle breeze blowing through the open north windows.  Imagine the weight of a fish – heavy for its size, but delightful to balance in your hand. Imagine the taste of surprise, the recoil of your tongue and a tingling of your lips against an acid splash. Imagine the dull thud of of a steak against the butcher’s block.

From the audience “a nipple at one end and a dimple at the other.”  “Nature’s definition of yellow.”  “It has an outie for a belly button.”

Then, we all closed our eyes and listened to Kat chop a lemon.  The experience was actually pretty interesting!

You can hear the chimes of the blade as the lime gives way, followed by a visceral, satisfying thud.  You know you’ve made it through.  The sound is accomplished and complete, like connecting a swinging bat to a ball. Work has been done.

And after listening to the excerpts from the room, everyone is now horny.  People wrote about college roommates humping, and juicy sacs, and all kinds of thinly-veiled innuendo. 

Next up… the smell. 

It smells like sour honey, and the waxy leaves of a garden tree.  It smells like hot tea and a headache.

Other attendees’ descriptions were much better.

Kat now challenges us to pause and listen.  What do we hear?  How are we really connecting with our senses?  It’s pretty remarkable, actually.

Kat tells us to pay attention to every moment of our lives.  Most of us aren’t getting paid for it, so we must love it.  She challenges us to love more.

Lunchtime!!!

They had to turn off the Twitter feed on the projector due to inappropriate tweets!  Here’s Spinasse’s Jason Stratton telling us what he’s prepared.  I didn’t catch it all, but it sounds fantastic.

Restaurateur powerhouse John Howie will be serving a Salmon Carpaccio

Campagne (and Café Campagne) chef Daisley Gordon will be serving beef tartare!  I can’t tell you how excited I am for this!

Chef Shanon from Bastille will be serving grilled octopus and arugula from their rooftop garden.

Sunday – Day 2

First session of the morning – Writing: Food Blogging For Specialized Diets

• Shauna James Ahern, author of the blog Gluten-Free Girl and the book Gluten-Free Girl: How I Found the Food That Loves Me Back…And How You Can Too
• Alex Jamieson, author of Living Vegan for Dummies and The Great American Detox Diet

Did you know that 1 out of 7 people in America has a problem digesting gluten?  Shauna had us stand up if we (or someone we love) has foods they can’t eat.  Nearly everyone was on their feet!

Great discussion on eating with restrictions!

Guess what’s next…. Nathan Myhrvold and Modernist Cuisine!!! I can’t wait.

Total kitchen time: 25 minutes

Shopping list:

• 2 salmon fillets, about 15mm thick
• 1 tsp. smoked salt
• 1/4 tsp. freshly ground black pepper

1. Preheat your water bath to 45.5°C.  [Note: Consuming undercooked fish blah blah blah.  Some people will cook their salmon at 39°C, but that’s a little rare even for my taste.  If you’re squeamish, crank up the temp to 52°C.]
2. Remove the skin from the salmon fillets (reserve for frying, if you want.)  Divide the salt and pepper between the fillets and coat both sides.  Place the fillets, together or individually) into vacuum seal bags, but don’t seal them yet.
3. Prepare an ice bath large enough for the salmon fillets in their bags.
4. Load a Smoking Gun with hickory wood shavings.  Insert the exhaust hose into the open end of the bag and fold over the open edge to partially seal the bag.

   

5. Turn on the Smoking Gun and light the wood chips.  Smoke the entire bowl into the bag, retaining as much smoke as possible. 
6. Holding the open end of the bag up, submerge the bag into the ice bath for a few seconds to condense the remaining smoke.  Seal the open end in the vacuum sealer.
7. Cook the salmon in the water bath for 15 minutes.  Remove and serve.

Given the soft texture of the salmon, I thought it would be good to pair it with something crunchy.  I fried kale leaves in grapeseed oil for a few seconds per side (look out for major oil splatter!) and roasted asparagus with olive oil and rosemary salt.  I also fried the leftover salmon skin until it was slightly crispy and used it to wrap the asparagus.  This is one of my new favorite salmon preparations, and I can’t wait to see what else I can instant-smoke!

In the meantime, I thought I’d share a little prediction.  By the year 2020, you’ll be able to purchase the following items anywhere that also carries a George Foreman Grill.  These devices are way out there now – only the most adventurous (and well funded) chefs are using them, but they’re headed to a kitchen near you… along with those jetpacks.

What the hell is it?
A centrifuge.

What does it do?
It spins little vials of liquid around really, really fast. 

What say the white lab coats?
Centrifuges are used for separating out the parts of a liquid by density.  Your doctor probably uses one to separate your blood cells from plasma to, um, look at them and stuff. 

You put food in that thing?
Although centrifuges have already been used for years in industrial food processing (separating cream from milk, separating sugar crystals from their mother liquor), they’re just now starting to appear in the geekiest restaurant kitchens.  Chefs use centrifuges to clarify stocks, sauces and even lime juice.  Even the finest mesh strainer is no match for the separating power of the sedimentation principle, so the next time you’re making consommé consider your centrifuge instead of your chinoise. 

What the hell is it?
A rotary evaporator.

What does it do?
It extracts solvents from substances.  Kind of like a moonshine still, but designed by robots from the future.

What say the white lab coats?
By creating a vacuum inside the glass chamber, the rotary evaporator reduces the boiling point of a compound liquid.  Then, through gentle heating and turning, solvents dissolved in the liquid are evaporated and removed.

You put food in that thing?
Imagine being able to extract the essential flavor from just about anything into a highly-concentrated liquid.  Sure, you can go buy mint extract or even rosemary extract (if you know where to look), but what about the essential oil of bacon or saffron?  Chicago’s famed Alinea restaurant has been using rotovaps to distill the essential oils from herbs, and even chiles – all flavor, no heat.  So, when you’re baking cookies and the recipe calls for vanilla extract, don’t turn to the plastic vial from the grocery store; make your own!

What the hell is it?
It’s a freeze dryer.

What does it do?
It freeze dries, R-tard.

What say the white lab coats?
Freeze drying has all the benefits of freezing, but without those nasty ice crystals.  The freeze dryer freezes the materials inside, then creates a vacuum and adds just enough heat so that the water frozen inside the materials converts directly to gas and escapes.

You put food in that thing?
It may not surprise you to hear that freeze dryers are used for culinary applications.  After all, this was the space-age piece of technology that brought us Astronaut Ice Cream.  But it’s not all about infinite shelf lives and lightweight transportation.  Ferran Adrià, often called the best chef in the world, has been freeze drying slices of fruit at his restaurant El Bulli.  10 years from now, when you want to make apple chips and jerky, you won’t be reaching for the dehydrator – you’ll be freeze drying!

Although this may be the antithesis of my own culinary philosophy, the idea was just too indulgent to let go.  But, to do justice to this masterpiece of American-Chinese-American fusion, I felt that I really needed to commit – so most of the ingredients are premade and can be found in the freezer section!  Is this dish the epitome of the bastardization of Asian cuisine?  Perhaps.  Was it actually, shamefully delicious?  You bet.

Makes: 6 ethnically-retarded servings
Total kitchen time: 1 hour

Shopping List:

• 1 bag frozen Mandarin Chicken (available at Trader Joe’s)
• 1 cup frozen “Organic Foursome” (carrots, peas, green beans and corn, available at Trader Joe’s)
• 2 cups prepared sushi rice
• 1 tbsp. low sodium soy sauce
• 1 premade pie crust, thawed (available at Trader Joe’s) [Note: use 2 pie crusts if making individual pot pies]

1. Preheat your oven to 450°F.
2. Prepare the Mandarin Chicken according to the package directions, reserving the sauce packets.  Set aside.
3. Thaw 1 cup of frozen vegetables, and mix together with Mandarin Chicken, sushi rice and soy sauce in a large bowl.  Add the Mandarin sauce and stir to combine.
4. You can prepare the pot pie in either one large round casserole dish, or in 6 medium ramekins.  If using one dish, spoon in the chicken, vegetable and rice mixture and push into the dish with the back of a spoon to compress.  Top with the pie crust and crimp the edges with a fork.
   If making individual pot pies, divide the filling between 6 medium ramekins and cut the pie crusts into rounds to cover.  Poke small holes in the middle of the crusts to allow steam to escape.
5. Bake for 30 minutes, or until crusts are golden brown.  Allow to cool 10 minutes before serving.

I’m secretly hoping that this dish sweeps the nation (well, at least the middle part) as the next big trend.  There is something delightfully Paula Dean-y about the combination, not unlike “chicken tempura with BBQ sauce”.  So, if you’ve got friends or family who prefer something semi-homemade and anti-culinary, why not pass this gem along.

Makes: 1/2 cup better butter
Total kitchen time: 5 minutes

Shopping list:

• 1 stick (1/2 cup) unsalted butter (best if homemade), at room temperature
• 2 tsp. St. Germain
• 1/4 tsp. fine sea salt

1. Combine the butter and St. Germain in a small bowl using the back of a fork. 
2. Add salt and stir to combine.  Add additional salt, to taste, if necessary.

So, next time you’re putting bread and butter on the table, consider making the party a little more interesting by getting your butter liquored up.  Your mouth will thank you.

It doesn’t matter how old you are – there’s still a little kid inside you who just loves roasting marshmallows over a campfire.  However, if a campfire is a impractical for your next dinner party, try this simple trick: use your fondue set for tableside s’mores.  [Caution: locate your nearest fire extinguisher before attempting, and don’t serve alongside that bottle of 90 proof Brandy.]

To make your s’mores a bit classier, try using premium chocolate (sorry Hershey’s, it’s not me, it’s you).  I prefer Seattle-based Theo Chocolate’s Coconut Curry and Fig, Fennel & Almond, though there are hundreds of exotic flavors out there that will easily earn you your Open Flame Artisan Pastry Making merit badge.

1.  Extra-Long BBQ Tongs.  They don’t sound geeky, but this single piece of equipment can mean the difference between retaining your forearm hair or not.  Look for locking tongs at least 16” long, with metal ends since plastic and even silicone can melt at grilling temperature.

2.  TurboQue Turbo-Charged Smoker.  This battery-operated fan attaches to the inside of your grill and turns it into a convection smoker.  This means reduced cooking time and extra exposure to smoke from wood chips. 

3.  Infrared Thermometer.  Sure, you could hold your hand above the grill grate and count “one Mississippi… two Mississippi,” but it’s far more geeky to be accurate to .1 degrees Fahrenheit.  This non-contact thermometer instantly measures surface temperatures with the pull of a trigger, enticing you to be quick on the draw. 

4.  Instant Digital Probe Thermometer.  While the infrared thermometer will tell you how hot the grill is, it won’t give you a read on the internal temperature of your porterhouse.  Use a probe thermometer to quickly check the doneness of thick cuts without having to slice them open.  Choose a digital instant read over an analog model, unless you enjoy waiting while your fingernails melt over the fire.

5.  Onion Goggles.  You may look a little… special… flipping burgers with these on, but if you’re cooking with smoke, or better yet, over a campfire, they are indispensable.  The foam-lined glasses are highly effective at keeping the smoke out of your eyes, and keeping girls from ever talking to you.  But hey, form follows function, right?

If you caught my post last week on smoking your own salt, you learned how easy it is to turn ordinary salt into an extraordinary seasoning.  But did you know that you can pull off the same trick with flour?  In this recipe, I’ve smoked Semolina flour – the most common kind used for pasta making.  The finished pasta takes on a subtly spicy smoke flavor and is a great match for Morel mushrooms. 

Makes: 2 Smoky Bowls
Total kitchen time: 2.5 hours

Shopping List:

• 1.5 Cups Semolina Flour
• 2 Cups Hickory wood chips, soaked in water for 30 minutes
• 2 eggs, beaten
• 1/2 tsp. hickory smoked salt
• 2 tbsp. olive oil
• 2 tbsp. water

For the morel cream sauce:

• 1/2 cup dried Morel mushrooms
• 2 cups simmering water
• 1 tsp. butter
• 1/4 cup dry white wine
• 1/4 cup heavy cream
• 1/2 tsp. hickory smoked salt
• freshly ground black pepper, to taste

1. Set up your grill or smoker for smoking.  Add the hickory chips, and set the heat to medium low.
2. Place the semolina flour in a shallow, heat-proof dish like a jelly roll or cake pan and set inside your grill or smoker, away from the heat.  Smoke for 1 hour, or until your wood chips burn themselves out.
3. To make the pasta, combine the smoked flour, eggs, salt, olive oil and  tbsp. of water in a large bowl until it forms a dough.  Knead for 10 minutes, or until the dough is elastic.  Wrap the dough in a towel and let it sit 20 minutes before rolling.
4. Divide the dough into four equal parts.  Using a rolling pin or, better yet, a pasta maker, roll the dough until thin (I use setting 6 on the pasta maker).  Cut into 1/4” strips for fettuccini.  At this point, you can cook the pasta immediately, or hang it to dry for 2 hours, then store in an air-tight plastic container. 
5. Boil the pasta in a large pot of water for 4-5 minutes, or until tender

For the morel cream sauce:

1. Soak the dried morels in 2 cups of simmering water for at least 30 minutes.  Reserve the water.
2. Heat the butter over high heat in a large skillet or saucepan.  Add the morels and sauté until they are lightly browned. Add the white wine, heavy cream and about 1/4 cup of the reserved mushroom water.  Cook until the liquid has reduced by half, about 3 minutes.  Season to taste with smoked salt and pepper.

Fettuccini is, of course, just one of the many uses for smoked flour.  The same principle applies to bread, pizza dough – hell, I bet a chocolate chip cookie might even taste great with a little smoke.  Or, for that authentic campfire flavor, why not make your own smoked graham crackers?  So, Seattle, what else are you smoking?

If you haven’t noticed, flavored salts are becoming wildly popular.  On a recent trip to Whole Foods, I spotted an aisle-end display with no fewer than a dozen varieties: some infused with spices, some mined or harvested from exotic locales, and some smoked.  Smoked salts – salts that have taken on the flavor of a particular burnt wood – are an excellent way to add a deep, campfire flavor to dishes.  I use them all the time in dry rubs, and as a substitute for the flavor you get from actually cooking over wood.  In this video I’m using hickory chips, but another popular option is to flavor your salt with by smoking the wood from old wine barrels.  Needless to say, you’ll save a ton of cash on specialty salts, which, of course, you’ll need to import all those ancient wine barrels from Bordeaux!

Makes: 4 Tacos Scientificos
Total kitchen time: 30 minutes (+12 hours cooking time)
Special equipment: Vacuum sealer, sous vide water oven

Shopping list:

• 1 lb. flank steak
• 1 tsp. Mexican seasoning blend
• 2 tbsp. lime juice
• 1 large red onion, diced
• 1 tsp. olive oil
• 1/4 cup dark brown sugar
• 1 tbsp. sherry vinegar
• 1 pinch salt
• 4 four tortillas
• 1 cup crumbled goat’s cheese
• 1/2 cup sour cream
• 1 bunch cilantro

1. Pat the steak dry and coat all sides with Mexican seasoning blend and lime juice.  Vacuum seal the steak in a bag large enough that the meat lays flat (but still fits in your water oven).  Cut the meat into two pieces and seal separately, if needed.  (If you’re not cooking your steak sous vide, place it in a zip-top bag or a covered shallow dish and let it marinate overnight). Note: although it might be tempting to add aromatics like garlic to the marinade, don’t! Your kitchen will smell like ass by the time the meat is done.
2. Set your sous vide water oven to 56°C.  Add the vacuum sealed steak, making sure the meat stays submerged.  Cook for a minimum of 1 hour, up to 48 hours.  The picture above shows the meat after cooking for 12 hours, which was perfectly tender.
3. Meanwhile, heat 1 tsp. olive oil in a medium saucepan over moderate heat.  Add the red onion and reduce the heat to low.  Let the onion sweat 5 minutes, until it is slightly translucent, but not browned.  Add the dark brown sugar, sherry vinegar and salt and stir to combine. Simmer 30 minutes, stirring occasionally, and making sure the mixture doesn’t boil or burn. 
4. Remove the bag from the water bath and let the meat rest, still in the bag, for 10 minutes before searing.  Remove the meat from the bag and pat dry on all sides.  Sear with a blow torch, under the broiler, or in a smoking-hot pan.
5. Slice the meat perpendicular to the direction of the muscle fibers, and on a sharp bias. 
6. Assemble the tacos: tortilla, sour cream, steak, cheese, onion compote, cilantro.  Enjoy!

Cooking the steak sous vide rather than just grilling it may sound like a pain in the ass since you have to plan 12 hours ahead.  However, the hardest part of cooking flank steak is getting your timing right. Leave it on the grill 1 minute too long and it’s overcooked and tough; take it off too early and it’s raw.  And, if you’re entertaining company, you may be more focused on your margarita than your steak.  Cooking your meat sous vide lets you be laissez-faire with your timing – sometimes I even sear my steak before company arrives and return it to the water bath to keep it warm until we’re ready to eat.

Rachel and I just returned from a week in New Orleans.  In my humble opinion, New Orleans has the best regional cuisine of any city in America – the heavily French- and African-influenced flavors of Creole food are simply unmatched by any other American ethnic cooking style.  So, needless to say, I was quite pleased to eat my way through the city.  We made sure to hit most of the predictably great spots – Galatoires, Brennan’s, Felix’s Oyster Bar – but it was our meal at Irene’s, a quaint Italian restaurant off the beaten path, that we will remember most fondly.

It was our last night in town and Rachel had chosen Irene’s based on the suggestion of a local couple we had met (and with whom we subsequently shared take-out gumbo on the roof of their 1790’s apartment building).  After the long walk from our hotel to the restaurant, we were greeted with the same hospitality shown to us by every place we had eaten, and to which we were becoming pleasantly accustomed.  We were seated in the corner of one of three intimate dining rooms, surrounded by wall-mounted photos of past patrons, who we assumed were of some significance.  Rachel and I ordered Gin Mojitos and split a crabmeat gratin appetizer, which, as with much of the cuisine in New Orleans, was an unabashedly indulgent combination of seafood and dairy. 

We continued on with a steak and a Pompano Meunière Amandine, the latter of which is a local classic: a pompano fillet broiled and topped with browned butter, crabmeat and toasted slivered almonds.  The food was all excellent, and armed with the knowledge of our immanent return to Seattle and the requisite post-vacation diet that would follow, we savored every bite until our clothes no longer fit correctly. 

And it was right then, at the end of the meal, that our dinner really became spectacular.  During the step of the waiter-patron protocol at which your server normally delivers the check to the table, our waiter instead informed us that our meal would be free.  We were puzzled.  He explained that another couple had been in the restaurant just slightly earlier that evening to celebrate their wedding anniversary.  Apparently, this couple had adopted the custom of anonymously paying for the dinner a random pair of diners who appeared to be out of town.  As luck would have it, we ended up being that pair for the evening.  I asked if we could meet our benefactors or at least send them a bottle of champagne in return, but alas, it was against the rules of their charity. 

Rachel and I were stunned by their generosity and we were at once giddy and deeply touched.  Unable to identify and thank the couple personally, we decided that the best thing we could do is to pay forward this incredible gesture.  It is an all-to-rare occurrence these days to witness a truly altruistic act, particularly one as substantial as buying an upscale dinner for strangers.  However, I knew that the only thing that matched our joy was the contentment of the generous couple who had made our night so special.  Personally, I look forward to being on the other end of the transaction now and then.  If we can provide to another couple the happiness and lasting memory of a meal paid for by anonymous strangers, it will be well worth the cost of dinner. 

And for that reason, I probably shouldn’t tell you where we’re planning to eat on our anniversary

It’s been a little while since I checked in, but I thought I’d give a quick update.  I’m hard at work getting production versions of my sous vide heating immersion circulators ready for sale.  The picture above is of my current prototype, based largely off of the DIY design I published a few months ago.  As you can see, I’ve got a custom-made heating coil and a slightly prettier enclosure.  The controller I’ve selected is also far more user-friendly, and I’ve upgraded other components after months of intense testing (and a handful of literal meltdowns). 

Anyhow, I’m still working as hard as I can to bring you all a sub-$200 sous vide heating immersion circulator accurate to .1C!  If you’d like to be on the email list when the first units are ready for sale, please leave a comment below.

If you couldn’t tell, I’ve been slightly obsessed with molecular gastronomy (“modernist cuisine” if you’ve read the Nathan Myhrvold interview).  Unfortunately, I’m a long way off from having centrifuges, rotary evaporators and tanks of liquid nitrogen lying around my lab kitchen.  Luckily, some of the geekiest cooking techniques work very well with home kitchen substitutes, and dry ice sorbet is the perfect example.  Eric Rivera first introduced me to this technique during one of our periodic food experimentation meetings.  Depending on the sugar content of the sorbet base and the type of mixer attachment, you can produce anything from fluffy, soft, taffy-like sorbets like this one to desserts with the consistency of Dippin-Dots.  Last night I added lime zest, lime juice and a shot of tequila to the sorbet base, then topped the result with lime salt for the coldest, sweetest smoothest margarita sorbet you’ve ever tasted!

Note: Whenever you’re working with dry ice, WEAR THICK GLOVES. Having sensation in your appendages is a good thing.

Note Two: In the video, I say to bring the sorbet base to a boil.  Further testing has shown that’s really not necessary.  A simmer is usually sufficient for the sugar and water to be completely combined.

A few weeks ago, I had the opportunity to talk with Nathan Myhrvold about his upcoming book, MODERNIST CUSINE: The Art & Science of Cooking (by Dr. Nathan Myhrvold & Chris Young).  But this is no ordinary cook book – it is a 4-volume tome totaling over 2200 pages on recipes and techniques you might think of as “molecular gastronomy”.  Although Nathan humbly denies the analogy, this book is poised to do for modern cooking what Escoffier did for classical cuisine a hundred years ago.

If you haven’t heard of Nathan Myhrvold, you’ll likely enjoy his Wikipedia bio, which should be cataloged somewhere between the biography of Leonardo da Vinci and The Adventures of Baron von Münchhausen, except that all of his accomplishments are verifiably true.  Nathan, a native Seattleite, is the founder and CEO of Intellectual Ventures, a company that specializes in “the business of invention”.  His resume includes a PhD in theoretical and mathematical physics and awards in wildlife photography.  His archeological paleontological expeditions have discovered more T-Rex fossils than any other group, and he has published breakthrough research on the trajectory patterns of penguin feces.  He designs nuclear reactors and laser guns that zap mosquitoes in mid-air.  And he is a major food geek.

I’ve followed the sous vide thread on eGullet and I noticed that your first post was in March of 2004.  What began your interest in sous vide cooking?

I’ve been interested in cooking forever. I have this very elaborate kitchen at home. It’s the second-most technological kitchen in Seattle – the first is the one that we built over at the lab for the cookbook. But it’s only first because we moved a bunch of my stuff from home over there!

I had bought all of the equipment for sous vide a year or so before that.  I was working with it and getting some results, but I sort of assumed there’s this huge body of knowledge out there and I just didn’t happen to connect with it.  I put that [post on the eGullet forum] out there naively thinking people would say, ‘Fine here’s a bunch of techniques and recipes.’

I was naïve! What I discovered was, nobody actually had a clue. I don’t mean that rudely, but at that point in time (2004) Roca’s book hadn’t come out. The only books I found were books about either commercial food service or a couple of books that were in French, and which seemed to have very high temperatures and were not the real deal.

…A year or so in after I had published my major tables, and I was one of the big posters in the sous vide forum, I realized how little people knew, I saw how much interest there was, I saw how much misinformation there was and so that’s when I decided I really oughtta write a cook book.

So, who is the audience for the book?  And will we need thousands of dollars in lab equipment to follow along?

One of the ideas is that at least a big portion of the book is for modern cooking what a book like La Technique, a book by Jacques Pepin, or the CIA’s big textbook.

I’ve been asked if this book is for home chefs, and one of the things I’d like to point out is that I am a home chef! So, YES, HELL YES IT IS! It’s for people who are really interested in food. If you’re really interested in food, I think that finding out how something works, even if you don’t have the equipment, is of value. 

We’ve got a couple of principles. One is that we don’t dumb the book down. There’s a lot of books that take a very folksy, dumbed-down, oversimplified kind of view. We try not to do that.

In order to explain these techniques, and to explain the equipment and to explain the ingredients, we have to do stuff that everyone else takes for granted.  You don’t have to tell people what a sauté pan is, but if you talk about a water bath or a freeze dryer or a combi-oven, you do have to tell people what it is.

We include stuff with equipment that no one else has, so far as we know. We have more equipment than Heston Bluemthal, or Ferran Adrià, or anybody else… except there might be someone who’s a chef working for a food science company that might have as much as we do… but only maybe!

You don’t need to be able to make every single recipe in the book, and if that’s the test, then that’s the wrong test.

Do you think there’s a market for special equipment like sous vide machines in home kitchens?

There is absolutely no reason that sous vide can’t be done at home. It is slightly more trouble than some other methods.  Take deep frying as an example. Deep frying is done at home, but it’s done in professional kitchens a whole lot more.

Here’s a great example: if you guessed how many people would have rotisseries at home, it used to be a small number. And then Ron Popiel invented his Ronco Showtime, and they’ve sold a couple million of them. Now, a couple million is still only a few percent of US homes, but it’s a big phenomenon!

You could say the same things about crock pots, about bread machines, espresso machines, food processors… so I think that home sous vide is going to be at least as popular… in the ball park anyway… of these other things.

What have you discovered that was shockingly great?  How about shockingly awful?

The shockingly positive things were how you get textures and flavors you just could not get any other possible way. For example, taking a tough piece of meat and cooking it for 48 hours, sometimes more, to get a medium rare color and taste with a very tender texture that normally, to get with the same piece of meat, you’d have to cook it at a much higher temperature and you’d get something gray. I think that is shockingly great.  Being able to control seafood so you don’t overcook it is shockingly great.

These are all cases where you have proteins that at particular temperatures, in a very narrow temperature range, will make a huge change in their texture or flavor. Sous vide allows you to control that exquisitely where as conventional cooking doesn’t.

There are some things that don’t work very well sous vide. Broccoli for example, can give off a sulfurous smell, so when you open up the bag it’s quite a shock!

I read about your double-blind sous vide duck confit experiment.  Apparently you have experimental evidence that shows that tasters can’t tell the difference between traditional confit and duck that had been cooked sous vide and brushed with fat.  Did this piss off a lot of people? 

This is not something to agree or disagree with – it’s something to experiment with. If you have an experiment that gives you a different result, well, good for you… then we’ve got a discussion!

Is there an inherent conflict between modernist cuisine and the farm-to-table movement?  How do you reconcile the desire to eat local, organic and sustainable foods with the fact that many of the ingredients you discuss in the book are refined chemicals?

There are people who have beliefs about food which they believe with the same fervor that they might apply to religion. These are secular, I don’t literally mean religious foods like keeping kosher. I mean that people have an attachment to a certain idea like organic, or about local, or about sustainable… whatever the hell that means. And I don’t mean to be rude about it.

On the other hand, it’s very frequent that people aren’t willing to stop there. They also want to tell you why their approach is morally right or superior. Morally right, better for the environment, better for you health wise… And once you start appealing to an objective standard like that, then I think it’s fair to start saying, “OK, well does this really make sense?”

Let’s take baking as an example. If you make muffins, you are going to use some baking powder. The baking powder is a chemical – of course everything is a chemical, but this is a particularly refined chemical. It’s mined! It’s not grown, it’s mined! You’re probably going to use salt. Guess what? You salt is either mined, or it’s evaporated out of the ocean. You can go on and on, but essentially there are a whole bunch of ingredients that everyone uses because they’re old.

My favorite example of this is sucrose: sugar. Sugar used to be an exotic chemical that you bought at the pharmacy, that was very expensive. Now all of those things we’ve come to terms with.

I don’t think that there is anything that is wrong, from essentially any standpoint, with using ingredients like hydrocolloids. Now, guess what? They’re all made one of two ways: they’re either made from fermentation, but we make wine from fermentation and vinegar so what’s wrong with fermenting this stuff? Or, it’s made as an extract of seaweed. OK, if you’re willing to have nori on your sushi, why should you object to this?

Organic is another issue. Organic used to mean it was a small producer, like the small farmers you see at Pike Place Market. In which case, it was frequently an heirloom variety, it was picked ripe, you ate it very quickly after it was picked or harvested… that stuff is great! However, today, because of Whole Foods and so fourth, Wal-Mart is now in the organic business and organic doesn’t mean small artisanal whatever… organic can mean stuff that is just as industrialized as anything else.

We have a sidebar in the book where we talk about the loopholes in the Organic rules. There’s a set of 200 different chemical compounds that are allowed and still have food classified as Organic. And there’s a whole political process by which people lobby to put those things there. Originally when the laws were made about what you could call organic, the ideas was that this is a temporary thing and they would be phased out. Over it’s history I think 150-some have been added and only one has ever been phased off. So it’s basically a joke!

The problem here is when people have a goal, and the goal becomes a slogan, the slogan can then be twisted to undermine their original goal.

I love the idea of the farm to table movement in terms of saying, “Absolutely, I’d rather have my sweet corn picked 10 minutes before we eat and barely cooked!” I love that, because it tastes better. The trouble is once you get tied up in this thing, it’s very easy to say it’s forbidden for you to put in some agar, but of course I’ll let you put some baking powder in your muffins. What’s up with that?!!

You refer to the techniques in your book as “modernist cuisine”, but we keep hearing about “molecular gastronomy”.  What’s the difference, and what difference does it make?

We trace the whole history of this in the book. It turns out that “molecular gastronomy” was a name that was invented in order to get use of a conference center in Sicily. There’s a conference center in the town of Erice in Sicily. And that conference center only allows scientific conferences. A man named Nicholas Kurti, who was a physicist in England, wanted to create a conference that brought scientists and chefs together. He did this with three other people – one was Harold McGee, another was a woman named Elizabeth Thomas, and the third one was Hervé This. They wouldn’t let them get the conference center to use it for their conference until and unless they changed the name, so Kurti came up with the name “molecular gastronomy”. There were a bunch of conferences given between 1992 and 2004 was the last one given, every few years you would have one of these little conferences. With one exception, none of the chefs who cook in the style of what we would call molecular gastronomy, actually ever attended one of those conferences. The only one that did was Heston Blumenthal, and he only attended the last two of them. So far as we can tell historically, nothing that came out of those conferences ever influenced ever influenced anyone in that movement.

Kurti died in 1998. After that point in time, Hervé This decided to really popularize the term Molecular Gastronomy. But if you talk to Hervé, he totally insists left right and center – you can find YouTube videos of him saying this- he swears that this new cuisine has nothing to do with with molecular gastronomy. He says, “That’s molecular cooking… that’s a distraction, that’s different than what I’m doing. What I’m doing is science.”

So, Hervé hates the idea of applying the name Molecular Gastronomy. Well it turns out the chefs hate it too. And the chefs hate it for maybe 3 reasons.  The first one is, any chef who cooks in this style has people come up to him and say “Oh you cook in the style of molecular gastronomy!” and they’ll say, “No I cook in my own style, thank you very much.”  Or they’ll say “Oh, so you’re a follower of Hervé This!”  And most of these chefs will say, “No I’ve never met Hervé, he’s never come to dinner here.”  And finally the chefs will say, “I cook in my own style – my style is different than Homaro Cantu, is different than Grant Achatz’s style, is different than Ferran Adrià’s style, which is different than Heston Blumenthal’s style, so don’t lump us all together. Give us some credit too – we came up with this shit!”

The analogy that I use is to something like the French Impressionists. They all painted in their own style also. Van Gogh is different than Matisse is different than essentially any of these other guys. Yet there still is meaning in grouping them together as part of a whole movement, ’cause they were part of a movement. So we try to make that point in the book and try to say, “Look there’s an overall movement here that we call modernist cuisine, but there’s a lot of variations within it. AND, by the way, don’t call it molecular gastronomy unless what you mean is literally what Hervé calls molecular gastronomy, because otherwise, you get everybody confused.”

At four volumes and over 2200 pages, this book sounds like it will be the largest body of information on modernist cuisine ever compiled.  Will this book do for modernist cuisine what Escoffier did for traditional cooking?

It would be impossibly arrogant of me to compare my book to Escoffier. So I’m certainly not going to do that. One interesting common denominator that Heston did and Ferran did and I did at various stages is all of us, when we were first getting into food, discovered Escoffier and nearly memorized the damn thing. Even though it was the cuisine of a century ago, published in 1903, we all actually used that as a foundation for our own understandings of cuisine, which I find quite interesting.

Does the arrival of this book mean that the latest culinary frontier has been conquered?

I think the revolution has only just begun. There’s an awful lot more to do. But it is at a stage where we need to communicate the ideas out to a wider audience.  But it’s still way too hard to learn how to do this stuff. So that is why we’re writing the book: to try to make it easier to get that information out there.

I’ve always loved science and technology, and I’ve loved the diversity of things you can address with science and technology.  I’ve been into food since I was 9 years old. I went to a traditional, classical chef’s school in France. I have all of the background of the classics, but it is this revolution of technique that allows me to apply things I’ve learned in technology and actually make something of a contribution.

The fact that I both did memorize Escoffier once upon a time and I went to culinary school and so forth, and I can write the code to model heat transfer – that combination is why we thought we could make a book that is different than any other.  This is the only cookbook in the world where one can say we’ve developed thousands of lines of our own unique software, just for the book.

So, what’s next?

We’re going to wind up doing a bunch of things to promote the book, and we’ve even started talking about what a second book would be like.

I, for one, am anxious to see what this book holds and how it just might change the landscape of contemporary cooking.  In the meantime, I’ll be reinforcing my bookcase shelves for the added weight of 2200 pages of pure food geek gold.

MODERNIST CUSINE: The Art & Science of Cooking by Dr. Nathan Myhrvold & Chris Young (Price TBA $; December, 2010, 2200+ pages)

Update (5/4): Reader BadRabbit reminded me that archaeologists study the history of mankind.  They do not, in fact, hunt for T-Rexes.