In my lab - Foams, part 1

I have a food geek friend who does not read my blog because the posts in here are too long. Laziness, that's what it is. So I have decided to please him by doing more and SHORTER posts for a while. I will be spending a bit of time researching some modernist techniques, and I will hold you updated on the proceedings in SHORT and frequent posts. The first topic will be foams.

Foam has become one of the defining icons of Modernist Cuisine. Foam in all shapes and sizes. My Modernist-doubting friends hate it. As one of them told me after eating in a restaurant steeped in modernism: "There was foam on everything! Terrible!" This series of posts will make them foam at the mouth. Pun intended.

I think foams are wonderful elements in dishes. As a slight kiss of a taste in a thin "air", almost as a very light sauce or like a light puree in thicker versions. As a small element to complement something else, or as the main event on the plate. Often I consider foams as being quite equal to sauces. And, mind you, in many cuisines there are sauces on just about everything, but no-one complains about that, do they. I think it is all about what you are used to.

But what are foams? How do they work? How can I control the thickness, density and stability of them? That is what I want to find out. In the next series of (SHORT) posts, I will try to research this.

I actually have dreamt up a new dish that I do not know how I am going to make and it contains a foam. I will be working towards finding out how to solve that. There are also other elements in this dish that I will need to research later on. So there will be a number of posts coming your way reporting on this.

SHORT posts.

So read them!

Onion fluid gel

Ok, so I remembered it wrong. And had to improvise. But it actually turned out quite good. There is a video on youtube called The Fat Duck - Masterclass (Part 1 of 2) that I had seen a while ago, and they mentioned an onion fluid gel. As we did our shopping for the Sunday dinner, I wanted to try that with the meat we bought. But I could not remember the details. I knew they cooked onions sous vide and then made a fluid gel out of that. So I bought two red onions. As I came home, I found the video and the spot where the chef says "and we cook these sous vide for 96 hours". And this was on the Saturday with no 96 hours to be had. So I sliced the onions thinly and sealed them with a bit of olive oil and some baking soda in a ziplock sous vide bag. Since I do not have a chamber vacuum machine but one that sucks the air out from the edge of the bag, I cannot use it when there is liquid in there. One solution to that is to freeze the liquid, but this time I chose the ziplock bag using water immersion to try to get as much air out as possible. This, of course, leaves a bit of air in there causing the bag to float, especially as the air is warmed by the heat, so it has to be weighted down. Bit of a nuisance, but it works.

Why the baking soda? Just a whim. Baking soda makes stuff more alkaline. That makes the Maillard reaction accelerate. This reaction is responsible for the dark colours on browned meats, but it also gives rise to a wealth of flavour compounds. Normally this does not start to happen until the food hits 100-120 degrees, but perhaps the added baking soda would help. I do not know, but I tried. Did it help? I still don't know.

I cooked the onions in the water bath at 85 degrees for as long as I could before dinner on Sunday. That turned out to be a out 24 hours. When taking the bag out, the contents was quite brown, and quite a bit of liquid had gathered. I should have taken a picture, but I forgot. Anyway, I strained the liquid and also pressed some of the soft onions through a sieve. This gave me 170 grams of dark fluid. I gave it a simmer and added some salt and pepper and 1 gram of Gellan. Than comes out at about 0.6%. This set into a quite firm gel. After running my immersion blender through it, it came out as a rather thick and very tasty fluid gel. it may be that 0.6% Gellan was a bit much, perhaps 0.4 would be better. The fluid gel turned out as a quite thick pure. I will be looking more into fluid gels at a later stage.

But it was good, and that is the most important thing. 

In my lab - Xanthan gum

So I am trying to learn about Modernist Cuisine. I am currently (and will for some time be) reading the gigantic 5 volume book Modernist Cuisine as well as numerous blogs and articles on the web. So I am getting all the theory, but to learn something, you really need to get your hands dirty. Well, that is perhaps not a term that works well in the kitchen, but you know what I mean. Try things out myself. Do stuff. See what happens. So I will be doing a series of posts where I investigate modernist techniques and ingredients. I will do this first and foremost to learn from it myself, but if other find it interesting as well it will be an added bonus.

I started getting interested in modernist food several years ago. I owe this interest to a Canadian friend of mine who lived here in Oslo at the time. So we talked about it and even tried out a few things, but it sort of died away. We had no real knowledge and we did not really know where to get it. But what I did manage to do was to buy stuff. I am quite good at buying stuff. So I ended up with a few cans of powders in my basement, tried to use it a couple of times without much success and then the spark died. Until now. Time to dig up those strange products again and see what I can do with them.

First out is my can of Xanthan gum. I got all my cans of mystery from Texturas back then. This is a company owned by Ferran Adrià, the famous chef who used to run the restaurant ElBulli and his brother selling modernist ingredients. They market their products with special brand names, so their Xanthan gum is called Xantana. You can find their website here:

http://www.albertyferranadria.com/eng/texturas.html

So, Xanthan gum, what is it? According to Wikipedia

Xanthan gum (/ˈzænθən/) is a polysaccharide secreted by the bacterium Xanthomonas campestris,^[2] used as a food additive and rheologymodifier,^[3] commonly used as a food thickening agent (in salad dressings, for example) and a stabilizer (in cosmetic products, for example, to prevent ingredients from separating).

So it is a thickener and stabiliser. It makes liquids thicker. According to Nathan Myhrvold, the author of Modernist Cuisine, it is one of the most versatile food additives developed over the past years.

"Xanthan gum is one of the most useful food additives around; it is effective in a wide range of viscosities, temperatures, and pH levels. It is easy to use, has no taste, and generally works quite well. And it can thicken liquids at extremely low concentrations —as little as 0.1% by weight can yield a thick liquid, and 0.5% by weight can make a thick paste..."

Time to do a bit of testing. I measured up 200 grams of cold water and slowly added 1 gram of my Xanthan while whisking. I ended up with lots of small lumps. By the way, this is how I like to weigh small amounts on my fine scales, using a paper to place the powder on. This makes it easy to add it to the food, and also all of my cups or other stuff is too heavy for the scales.

So whisking by hand in cold water is not a good idea. I repeated the same thing, but this time using my Bamix immersion blender. This worked out well. The powder was fully mixed with the water, but the blender added quite a lot of air bubbles that did not seem to go away by itself. After 30 minutes they were still there (or most of them). I tried sifting it 4 times. This removed some of the bubbles, but the mixture still had quite a lot of them.

Viscosity wise, the Xanthan had made the water thicker. A bit like saliva. This was 0.5% Xanthan by weight. According to Myhrvold, 0.5% could make a thick paste. This is not a thick paste. Could it be that the Texturas brand is weaker in any way? I need to buy another brand to test as well.

Next up, simmering water. I added the same concentration of Xanthan to simmering water, whisking by hand. This time there were no lumps. The powder mixed fully, and because I only mixed by hand, the amount of air bubbles was much less. The thickness seemed to be the same as with cold water. I added another gram of Xanthan powder to the same batch making a 1% mix. This gave me a rather thickish result, like a weak gel. I also added a little bit of yellow food colouring to be able to see it better and spooned a bit of it on a plate, see picture left. As you can see, it stays as a sort of low lump on the plate. It is very clear, but yo can also see some bubbles.

I then tried the immersion blender in this 1% solution. This gave med a very frothy solution with lots of well sized air bubbles. The colour was now quite opaque because of the bubbles. This can be used as a foam, but it feel kind of heavy in the mouth and a bit slimy, not as a light foam. 

But how should one mix Xanthan in a cold liquid? I tried mixing the powder with sugar and added this to the cold water. I made sure the powder was completely distributed and blended with the sugar. The outcome was perfect. Whisking by hand left no lumps. So we need to separate the powder into individual specs as much as possible before adding it to the water. This way it will not lump together. I also found that if the powder is first mixed with oil and the oil is then mixed with water, the final mix is lump free. 

I had some chicken stock in the fridge. I divided it in two times 2 dl and added 1.5 grams (0.75%) of Xanthan to one of them while simmering. This gave me a nice sauce thickness. The I started adding corn starch to the other batch until I had about the same consistency. That took about 10 grams. Since it took so much corn starch to thicken it, that one came out much more cloudy and opaque than the Xanthan one. My broth was not quite clear, and the Xanthan batch is as clear as the broth. Also, the Xanthan one tastes much more of the broth. It seems that the corn starch one has lost more flavour than I had anticipated. Since the amount of Xanthan is so small, neither taste nor clearness has suffered. So thickening with Xanthan keeps the taste better and also will give you a clearer sauce or whatever you are making.

We are having a salad with dinner tonight. I make two vinaigrettes, both at 3:1 totalling 1 dl. To one of them I add 0.3 grams of Xanthan in the oil before adding the Balsamic vinegar. Both are mixed using the immersion blender. After a couple of hours, the one without the Xanthan is clearly dividing into vinegar at the bottom and oil on top. The one with Xanthan seems to stay well mixed and is slightly thicker. Nice! But as Xanthan does not swell in oil, but only in water based liquid, I will guess that thickening oil based liquids does not work.

Also, for the same dinner I cooked the meat sous vide and then seared it in the pan. After searing I deglazed with water and a bit of red wine vinegar, salt and pepper and added about 0.75 grams of Xanthan. This turned out beautifully, the Xanthan thickening the gravy to a nice, thin sauce consistency.

Food from the Fat Duck - Hot and Iced Tea

Finally I got round to it. Heston Blumenthal's Hot and Iced Tea. This is one of his most famous concoctions, even though it is not really a dish. It is more like a small comment or minor happening that he uses as an overture to the sweet portion of the menu. For the uneducated out there who do not know what this is all about, let me enlighten you. At the Fat Duck restaurant, Heston Blumenthal serves a cup that contains hot tea in one half and iced in the other, divided vertically with no visible divider in the cup. Here is a video on youtube showing Heston doing this.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=N7i4F6vqOlc

I know this will be fuel to the fire for those of my friends that think the whole Modernist thing is just a stupid game for men and that it only is about making food look or feel differently than it should. Yes, ok, so this one is just a bit of fun. Or to produce a new and sensational feeling. Or even a laugh. So what? Why should we not allow food to be fun and playful as well? That is what I like most about Mr. Blumenthal. His playfulness. In addition to trying to make "ordinary" food taste, look and feel better, he also has fun with food. Great!

And now to the tea. The secret behind this piece of food magic is that in stead of being a liquid, the tea is what is called a liquid gel. Or actually two liquid gels, one hot and one cold. A liquid gel is really a more or less thick liquid, normally it is as thick as a sauce or a pure. It is generally made by adding a gelling agent to a liquid, let it set and then destroying the gel by mixing it with an immersion blender or by pushing it through a fine sieve. In this case, however, the liquid gels are very weak so that they can pass as liquids, but still so thick that they will not mix in the cup.

The preparation starts with making the tea. I used half of the recipe in the Big Fat Duck Cookbook page 283. I really do not know how copyrights work in these cases. Can I copy a recipe from a book and publish it in a blog? I would guess not, so I choose not to disclose details here.

Since I did this in the Christmas holidays, I used a Christmas tea instead of the prescribed Earl Grey. The recipe states that the water needs to have between 100 and 400 parts pr million of calcium. I took a chance on my Norwegian tap water, and it seemed to work fine.

The tea is made using cold water and the leaves are soaked for an hour. After the tea is brewed, I divided it in two, one for the hot part and one for the cold part. Now the fun starts. The fluid gel is made with Gellan F. Gellan is a modernist ingredient that is used for making gels. Obviously. It comes in two varieties, Gellan F and Gellan LT100. We want Gellan F here, and I have established that the Gellan variety that my local pusher at Sous Vide Norge sells is just that. The other ingredients needed are

• Sodium citrate - often used to heighten the pH value of a liquid, but here it is used to help the Gellan "hydrate without the impediments of ions" as it is stated in the forum on chefsteps.com. I am unsure how this works, but it looks like Gellan cannot hydrate properly with calcium ions present, and sodium citrate takes care of that. I will look into this when I research Gellan and other gelling agents in a later post.
• Calcium chloride - often used to add more calcium to a liquid, for example when doing spherification. It seems that for Gellan to set, it needs calcium, but since we took care of those ions while hydrating the Gellan, we need to supply new ones for it to be able to set. In other recipes with Gellan, all this is not done, and I do not know why it needs to be done here. It may be because of the rater low concentration of Gellan to make a weak liquid gel.
• Malic acid - this is an acid found in many fruits. It has a mouth watering effect in that it makes your mouth produce more saliva. This is used in an ingenious way here. The tea that we will produce is thicker than normal tea, but the presence of malic acid makes you produce more saliva which will dilute the tea in your mouth making it appear thinner. And since the cold brew will be thicker than the other one, the cold brew gets more acid. Ingenious.

I got these ingredients from Modernist Pantry at http://www.modernistpantry.com/. Buying stuff there and have it sent to Norway worked like a breeze. 

So we have one portion of tea for the cold part and one for the hot part. I added sugar, Gellan and sodium nitrate to both and brought them to a simmer while whisking. This will hydrate the Gellan. Then I made the calcium chloride and malic acid parts for the hot and the cold and added them. This will make the Gellan start to set. At this point I let the two parts rest in the fridge for almost 48 hours. 

When I got them out, they had both set into gels. At this stage, I pushed both gels through my finest sieve. This loosened up the gels and they became liquid like, but the cold one was quite much less liquid than the hot one. My sieve is not the finest there is. It may be that I should have used a finer one. 

Anyhow, I put both semi-liquids in suitable plastic bottles. Before use, I put the hot one in my sous vide water bath and the cold one was taken out of the fridge where it had been for some time and put into ice water. 

Now for the problem of a cup and divider. I have a glass with double sides so that when holding it, you will not feel the difference in temperature and have the surprise spoiled. Chris Young who worked with Heston on the tea project and now works at chefsteps.com (which I highly recommend, lots of classes, recipes and info) has revealed that they were using cardboard that were cut to fit in the cups and then covered with many layers of cling film, making them bot water resistant and more tight fitting. I poured the hot and cold parts into the glass and carefully took out the divider. The two parts stayed separated, oh joy! 

Success. The only negative thing was that the cold side felt considerably thicker than the hot side. I do not know why. I think it was supposed to be a bit thicker than the hot one, but the difference seemed to large and gave the thing away a bit. Even though the cold part had more malic acid, it did not manage to produce enough saliva to dilute it. I did this on January 1st, and we had quite much wine the night before. It could be that I was just too dry in the mouth after that... But all in all, the effect was good. 

A food magic trick, just for the fun of it.

Modernist Cuisine, the book - my first impressions

I have been the proud owner of the Modernist Cuisine cookbook for six months. Or books, rather, since it is a five volume work with an additional Kitchen Manual totalling 2438 pages and weighting 23,7 kg. I have not read it all yet, but I am planning to do so, with a few exceptions (see below). Currently I am well under way in volume three. I know that many people wonder what this is all about, so here are my thoughts so far.

I had read about this piece of culinary literature for some time and was suitably intrigued by what I read, but I really did not understand what it was. From what I gathered, it all revolved around something called modernist cuisine which I at that time did not know anything about other than that it probably was impossible to do by a mere mortal in a normal home kitchen. But as I have been a keen amateur chef most of my life, at times like to venture out into the unknown and also needed something substantial on my wish list for my 50th birthday, I officially wanted it. And I got it.

And, let it be known near and far, I love it, and for several reasons. First of all, I love well made books, almost regardless of the subject, and these books are well made. The binding is solid, the paper is of good quality and the whole thing comes in a plexiglass box. And they all have in-sewn satin bookmarks. I just love books with in-sewn satin bookmarks. The other thing you notice once you start flipping through the pages are the pictures. These books are a veritable art gallery.

The images are just gorgeously fantastic. Some are just inspirational, almost abstract images, others are highly instructional. The most famous of the images are those depicting equipment cut in half showing how they work. These are actually made by physically cutting things in half like a barbecue with meat on it. This is a fully working half barbecue complete with with half burgers and cole burning. The imagery is so good that they are now out in a book of their own. http://modernistcuisine.com/books/the-photography-of-modernist-cuisine/

But what about the actual contents? The first four of the five main volumes are divided into topics. These contain lots of theory about cooking mixed with lots of recipes. Volume five contain recipes for complete plated dishes. The last volume, the Kitchen Manual contains all recipes from the other volumes in a handy, ring bound volume made from splash proof paper that is practical in the kitchen.

So, what is this theory stuff? For any of you who has read Harold McGee's On Food and Cooking, these books are similar, but on steroids. And with more colour, both visually and language wise. In short, in addition to showing recipes, they explain how and why the different aspects of cooking work. As they say on the Modernist Cuisine web site: "The goal here is to break down recipes in such a way that you bet­ter under­stand not just the what (ingre­di­ents) and the how (meth­ods), but also the why." And for someone like me who loves to explore how things work, this is the true value of these books. What happens when you boil something? Why does baking food in the oven work? 

Volume 1, History and Fundamentals

This volume starts off with the history of cooking. This in itself is interesting, but it also places Modernist Cuisine in a broader scope. The largest portion of the volume is dedicated to microbiology, that is all the little creatures, bacteria etc that are in the food and how and why they can spoil the food. This is of course important stuff, especially for professional chefs, but I must admit that I found this chapter and the next where Food Safety is covered based on what we learned from the previous chapter a bit tedious for a keen amateur cook. But they are very important. The book then covers the fundamentals of heat and energy since most cooking is about treating ingredients with heat. The volume ends with a chapter that basically tells you what happens when water boils. And don't be fooled. You don't know, and it is actually quite interesting.

Volume 2, Techniques and Equipment

To me, this volume was very interesting. The first chapter goes through most of the traditional techniques for cooking food and explains how they work and also how to get the most from them. How does a barbecue really work, and how do you find the sweet spot in your barbecue where the food gets the most from the heat? Do you know that baking is all about drying the food? And what we often call roasting (about cooking meat in the oven) actually is baking? This chapter contains a ton of interesting stuff about things that you do every day in the kitchen without really knowing what you were doing. It also shows why traditional techniques rely on tremendous skill and good luck to achieve perfect doneness.

After this is a chapter that talks about modern ovens. I must admit that I skipped most of this as it mostly was about professional ovens that you find i restaurant kitchens and that I probably never will use.

Following this is an in-depth chapter on sous vide. Which I found most interesting. I have a sous vide setup, and this chapter gave me much needed knowledge about how to use optimise that and also gave me ideas of ways to use sous vide that I had not thought about earlier. The volume ends with an overview of equipment used in the modernist kitchen. Much of this will probably never find its way into the kitchens of most people. I skipped some of it, for instance the thorough coverage of the PacoJet, a machine that is too expensive for most home cooks.

Volume 3, Animals and Plants

This is where I am currently at, and I think the beginning of the meat section gives a good indication of what this entire set of books is all about.

The meat section starts with how a muscle works when it is part of a live animal. It then goes through what happens when the animal dies and how that same muscle turns from muscle to meat, how it can be aged and how it should be cut to achieve best results. All along there are highly informative images showing the principles of what is going on. It is thorough, it is well presented and it gives me a ton of background material that may help me to understand why food is the way it is.

And all the way there are recipes giving examples of the techniques and theory. And these are always very detailed and easy to follow. Like how to make the perfect burger on the left here. Recipes are also scalable so it is easier to make a different number of portions than shown in the book.

All in all I feel that Modernist Cuisine is giving me all I need to become a better cook. I do not really know what they learn in culinary school, but I would guess that these volumes should give you most of what you need. What you do not get are the classical recipes since the recipes in the books all follow the modernist approach. But the theory and background are the same for classical and modernist cooking.

Modernist Cuisine, rediculous toys for men?

Before today's serious topic, just a few words about last Sundays's post. As I mentioned there, I am planning to test Heston's Hot and Iced tea. I found out that I can get Gellan F which is needed for that recipe at my local pusher here in Oslo (http://sousvidenorge.no/). But I also need a few other things that I found that they did not have. These are sodium citrate, malic acid and calcium chloride. But I have now found a place on the internet where they seem to have everything one could possibly want. This is the Modernist Pantry, http://www.modernistpantry.com/ and many of you will already know it.

So my Christmas gift from me to me this year is a substantial order from them which is currently making its way here. But to anyone out there living in the Oslo area: Do you know of any other stores here who may stock these things? Nice as the Modernist Pantry is, and as good as they service seems to be, it would have been practical to be able to trot down to a local store to replenish missing items.

So the Hot and Iced is coming.

But now to something different. The other night my wife and I were attending a dinner party. The hostess is a very good cook. She is culinary educated and also a well established food journalist in Norway. Against this backdrop, I thought an inspiring conversation about modernist cuisine would be in order, so I said "Oh, by the way, I have started studying and testing out modernist cuisine lately".

That did not go down well. I felt a cold front sweeping over me. I got a distinct impression that this was not a good thing. "Modernist cuisine is just a toy and mainly for men". "It is just about making things look different than it tastes". The word molecular came up rather quickly. I made a huge social blunder by suggesting that these negative thoughts were brought about by lack of knowledge in the field. Not a good idea.

I said I have a Sous Vide machine. This was met with heavy frowning of eyebrows, so I tried to explain that Sous Vide is nothing else  than a new way of cooking food. The reply was that there is nothing new about it. Slow cooking has been done for ages, and you can do the same by vacuum sealing the food (she has a vacuum sealer) and cooking it on a low temperature in the oven. I really doubt that her oven is that stable and possibly cannot be set to a low enough temp, but I did not say so.

To me, Modernist Cuisine is about re-thinking the old ways and using a bit of science to see if we can take food a step further and perhaps avoid some of the compromises that is inherent in traditional cooking. In addition it opens up for more creativity and even humour in cooking. I decided to skip creativity and humour and played the "taking cooking one step further, purifying tastes and textures"-card. Did not work. She did not totally forbid it from the face of the earth, but told me several times that I should be cautious and keep my feet on the ground. I said "I really do not know what you mean", and she said "Yes, you do". She even warned me that I should be cautious about to who whom I spoke about this.

In the book Modernist Cuisine there is a chapter about the resistance that this trend has experienced, but I have never actually experienced it myself. I was quite blown away with something that I almost conceived a (mild) hatred towards the topic. Why? What is so wrong with it?

We (or they, actually, I was not into cooking then) saw the same thing with nouvelle cuisine in the 60's and 70's. Julia Child was not at all positive to that. That movement moved away from the classic French cuisine that had been codified by Escoffier at the start of the century and started investigated lighter sauces, fresher ingredients, less involved recipes and more simplicity and creativity. Like then, modernist cuisine is in part about not trusting inherited rules, but finding new ones. I think that this may feel threatening to people that are well established in the culinary world. People who's existence rely upon their knowledge of the old ways. I think the resistance is based on a combination of lack of knowledge and a fear for the unknown.

After establishing that modernist cuisine is just a passing whim and a toy for men, she said: "I create food trends in Norway". I found that quite scaring.

I will invite her to dinner in a little while. I will serve her a number of well tasting dishes that will not necessarily look very modern at all. I will keep foams to a minimum (they were snorted at). And then, when she has (hopefully) praised the food, I will tell her: "This, my friend, has been a modernist meal, and you liked it". And then I will write a blog post about it.

Wish me luck!

Gellan from CUISINE INNOVATION - what type is it?

Short, boring and technical post today. Gellan is a gelling agent that you will often find in modernist recipes. My local store,  Sousvide Norge sell a product called Gellangel from Cuisine Innovation her.

But when I read recipes, for instance in the Big Fat Duck Cookbook, there are two different types of gellan. There is Gellan F and there is Gellan LT100. Gellan F is described as a low Acyl gellan, and Gellan LT100 is, you guessed it, high Acyl gellan. The difference is that Gellan F creates hard, brittle, clear gels, while Gellan LT100 creates elastic, non brittle gels.






So what about the Cuisine Innovation product? From a bit of research tonight I have learned that it is Gellan F, which is what I was looking for. That means I can actually try out Heston Blumenthal's Hot and Iced Tea!

Coming soon to a blog post near you.