6 C. Liquid Nitrogen + 3 Tbsp.
Meat Glue + 1 Sonic Wave Blaster
That's part of the recipe for geek gourmet, a
strange brew of science and food.
• Photograph by Fredrik Broden
An artist uses a syringe to inject a pomegranate seed into the
mouths of gallerygoers. An eccentric billionaire cooks short ribs
in a science-lab water bath for 40 hours. A countercultural
technogeek in
San Francisco stages an event during which flavored
foam is spread over a bath of liquid nitrogen.
Welcome to the strange world of geek gourmet.
It's happening all around the world, inspired by a handful of
genius chefs. Restaurants such as
Heston Blumenthal's the Fat Duck
outside of London;
Ferran Adrià's El Bulli in Rosas, Spain; and
Wylie Dufresne's WD-50 in New York are routinely ranked as among
the best in the world, and three-star chefs flock there to see what
kind of wizardry will be cooked up next. Adrià and Blumenthal
practice a unique, cutting-edge
kind of cuisine called molecular gastronomy. Essentially, they have
reinvented the cooking process, setting aside thousands of years of
tradition and working from the ground up to create dishes based on
the molecular compatibilities of different ingredients by using all
the techniques of modern science to create flavors and textures
never before experienced.
Molecular gastronomy, for most of its short history, has been the
exclusive domain of chefs and scientists, food experts with immense
resources and the skills to put them into play. But nothing stays
out of the mainstream for long, and molecular gastronomy - or geek
gourmet, as it's sometimes called - has been picked up on by
amateurs. The best place to look for these food hackers is in the
technological counterculture, right along with the people who
joyfully rewrite
Microsoft code or reedit Star Wars movies to make
them better. One of the leading food hackers is Marc Powell of San
Francisco, a member of the Bay Area's hacker/artist/activist
community. Powell is a resident of Unicorn Precinct XIII, a
self-described "home to artists, musicians, hackers, anarchists,
spiritualists, freaks, cooks, and family." The 29-year-old
maintains a blog (www.foodhacking.com) that chronicles his ongoing
experiments. One recent post describes Powell's demonstration of
making a frigid almond-brandy sweet foam, cooled with liquid
nitrogen, at a Dorkbot event - a kind of hootenanny for
technogeeks. Of course, Powell also has access to a 200-mph
blender, five computers, and a naturally synthesized substance
called meat glue when he's concocting his delicacies.
For Powell, there's no major difference between the kind of cooking
he's doing now and the computer hacking he has done in the past.
"Chefs are a lot like hardware hackers," he writes. "Both geek out,
absorbing the specs [of the vegetables or the technology] for the
purpose of creating something that nobody else has" - an innovative
food or a new machine.
A few hundred miles to the north of Unicorn Precinct XIII, Nathan
Myhrvold is conducting molecular gastronomy experiments that Powell
can only dream of. Myhrvold, the former chief technology officer at
Microsoft, is probably about as close as you could get to Powell's
reverse image in the world of technology. He has written in favor
of intellectual-property rights in the
Wall Street Journal and was
a major figure in a company that most hackers love to hate. But
both men share the same love of MG for its own sake. The difference
is Myhrvold has essentially infinite resources with which to do it.
His home in Washington State is equipped with a 2,000-square-foot
food-science lab and every cutting-edge piece of equipment in the
world. His lab homogenizer, for example, is like a superblender -
"I can get particles a full order of magnitude smaller than even
the best blender in the world," he boasts. "One-micron
droplets!" Myhrvold resists the name geek gourmet, although he
readily admits to being "a huge food geek." Rather, he sees the
movement as "scientifically or rationally oriented cuisine."
Myhrvold knows what he's talking about when it comes to science. He
has a PhD in theoretical and mathematical physics, and he studied
cosmology, quantum field theory in curved space-time, and quantum
theories of gravitation with
Stephen Hawking at the University of
Cambridge before eventually landing at Microsoft. (Myhrvold also
has degrees in geophysics, space physics, and mathematical
economics.) But when it comes to cooking, he's learning as he goes.
Everyone in the field is; even a culinary superstar like Adrià
(whom Myhrvold once engaged to create a 42-course meal) is working
in a field that is in its infancy. Myhrvold is a regular on
eGullet.com and trades tips and suggestions with other users
around the country.
But Myhrvold - bearded, cheerful, bespectacled - is never happier
than when puttering around in his lab, using science equipment to
make food. He uses his ultrasonic cleaner, the same kind of
powerful instrument used to clean jewelry, for tasks as different
as making stock and emulsifying
oil and water. He cooks short ribs
inside a vacuum-sealed bag for 36 to 40 hours, and then, when they
are completely reddish pink and medium rare all the way through,
sears their surface on an induction range that superheats pans
through magnetism, without ever giving off radiant heat. He has an
ultraviolet sterilizer to free his environments of incubating
microbes. He uses a custom-built cold smoker to experiment on
salmon, as well as liquid nitrogen to make frozen cream puffs. But
his goals are much loftier than just adapting science tools: Like
any molecular gastronomist, amateur or professional, he wants to
re-create food from the level of its tiniest particles.
Myhrvold speaks rapturously of fluid gels, or liquids that act like
solids until the moment you pour them, and mozzarella powder ("You
can eat it with a spoon!"). Some of the equipment he uses is
beginning to find its way into ordinary restaurants and even the
homes of some especially ambitious gourmets. He speaks approvingly
of the Pacojet, a machine that grinds and pulverizes frozen
ingredients, creating incredibly smooth mousses and sorbets out of
practically anything. And he adores the ultimate kitchen appliance,
the Thermomix, an all-in-one gastronomy engine that chops, grinds,
mixes, blends, steams, heats, stirs, weighs, times, kneads, whips,
stews, and homogenizes - sometimes doing two or more of these
things simultaneously.
I ask Myhrvold if he thinks the kind of high-tech experimentation
he is doing will ever become the norm in ordinary kitchens. "I'm
not sure how safe it would be," he concedes. "This kind of cooking
is beyond the realm of intuition. You need to know about the
equipment, health issues, and the science behind it. But it's not
necessarily inaccessible. There are hundreds of people doing it
right now. But it's never going to displace the corner deli or
pizzeria."
To artist Miwa Koizumi, that's the idea behind this kind of
cooking. It's supposed to be strange, to make people reconsider
their notions of eating. "I want people to think about taste, about
what eating is like as a shared experience," she says. Koizumi, a
Japanese-born artist who developed her career in
France, is now
based in
New York City and creates food-art happenings at a
performance space called the Flux Factory. Some of these happenings
are pretty far-out, which is entirely intentional. Koizumi seeks to
reacquaint us with our sense of taste. Thus, in the appetizer
portion of All You Can Art, a food collaboration held last year,
Koizumi set out to have visitors "eat air." A pomegranate seed was
placed at the end of a syringelike plunger, and visitors were asked
to plunge, shooting vaporizing pomegranate liquor into their
mouths.
Koizumi's art is meant to be ethereal; she's using the techniques
of molecular gastronomy to completely abstract flavor from texture.
She gets some of her effects from liquid, as well - she used a
centrifuge to separate the liquid from 100 tomatoes, producing a
golden fluid that visitors were invited to taste. Without the
familiar visual cues, many didn't know they were tasting the
essence of tomato - which was exactly the point.
In talking to all these geek-gourmet enthusiasts, I am excited but
also a little depressed. Isn't there any way that these techniques
could enter my daily life? Are centrifuges, immersion baths, and
test tubes a necessity to taste the fruits of applied science in
the kitchen? I took my question to one of New York City's
preeminent geek-gourmet gurus, David Arnold of the French Culinary
Institute. Arnold is a boyish-looking man in his thirties who calls
to mind a high school science nerd from general casting, right down
to his short haircut and mismatched shirt and tie. He is intensely
energetic, curious, and enthusiastic about everything. And it is in
Arnold's home that I finally see geek gourmet in action in a
seminormal setting. Arnold's home kitchen, though not large even by
New York City apartment standards, has been completely refitted,
modified, and customized. But, for the most part, it's an ordinary
kitchen - only far more efficient.
There's a six-gallon deep fryer and a mortar and pestle. A
restaurant broiler, bought at a going-out-of-business sale, is
hooked up to the oven; the range has a double-valve system for
better control. The sink is six feet long, covered with sliding
cutting boards and equipped with double-powered cleanup jets that
are powered by foot pedals with an extralong cord to give complete
free play. Carbon dioxide tanks power a seltzer fountain. But the
most conspicuous piece of equipment here is Arnold's espresso
machine, to which he evinces an almost fanatical devotion.
"It's almost impossible to make a perfect cup of espresso," he
tells me, taking out an old-fashioned popcorn popper and roasting
the green coffee beans himself. Arnold uses a Rancilio grinder, a
precision instrument with dozens of settings. "The main thing is
not to use the blade or propeller-style grinders. You get an uneven
blend, and there's lots of dust - it's a real nightmare," he says,
shuddering. "How fine a grind you want to use is a variable - it
depends on the humidity in the room, the atmospheric pressure, your
temperature setting, and a lot of other things." Even the amount of
ground roasted coffee isn't constant. Arnold hates the use of
dosers, the fixed measured servings used in restaurants. Everything
that takes away control of the process bothers him. The tamping,
the packing, using just the right water - Arnold is as careful
about every step as an atom scientist working with live plutonium.
The one fixed quantity in the espresso process, he says, is time:
It should take 25 seconds to make a perfect shot. "Too long, and it
gets bitter. Too short, and it's thin. It's a very precise balance,
and I really try to stick to it," he explains, loosening his
tie.
Several other adjustments are made, including setting the steam
pressure to 1.5 bars - equivalent, I'm told, to the atmospheric
pressure in the room plus half. Arnold busies himself with
measuring the weight of the coffee, all the while discoursing on
the intricacies of preinfusion, the chemical release of oils under
heat, and the niceties of acidity and wineyness in African versus
South American coffees. Finally, the espresso is made. Arnold
admires it, showing me the telltale "tiger stripe" that marks it as
perfectly made. Am I ready to try it? I am. I feel a little like
J. Robert Oppenheimer, waiting to see if the atomic bomb will
detonate. Will this be the best espresso I have ever tasted? Will
it transcend, in balance, flavor, and body, every cup of coffee
haphazardly made by college dropouts that I have ever gulped down
before? Will it live up to the epic efforts of the geek
gourmet?
It does.