Steve Klc

Now we're getting somewhere when Mike says: "I also get a sense of soullessness in their dishes." Very true, there is a tendency in some competitions to define a look--a look which the judges seem to reward with higher scores. As to "soullessness" I think depends on your personal frame of reference. Do you get that same sense of "soullessness" when looking at pictures of dishes by Adria or Gagnaire? Is a plate of barbecue and corn on the cob dripping with butter inherently more "soulful" to you? "They are practiced to engineering standards, and the assembling chefs essentially become autobots using mechanical wonders and tricks to make what is or should be much more than just a pretty picture or shell." That's another way of saying physical skill. It helps define the difference between cooking and professional cooking--and the physicality and stamina required in the latter. Failure to appreciate this distinction is but one way the media who celebrate cookery book writers diminish what professionals do--as if it were so easy to achieve such physical speed and agility if one but tried. It's one way the dining public continues not to appreciate why they're asked to pay so much when they dine out if the ingredients are so inexpensive and cooking were so simple. If you think the best pastry chefs or chocolatiers working in their shops or the best sous chefs on the line of the best restaurants are any less mechanically efficient, graceful, practiced and clean, you're mistaken. And I have no idea what you mean by the last part --the mechanical wonders and tricks and the what is or should be more than a pretty picture or shell comment. You're not trying to imply that anything which looks rustic/Slow Food/Alice Waters-like must inherently taste better and more pure than anything prepared with obvious technical skills applied--the handwork and refinement involved in more sophisticated presentations--again readily apparent at the elite restaurant level? This is a running theme on eGullet--that of "applying technique"--but what it has to do here with your comment, I'm unsure. You're of course right that the end result should be more than a pretty shell--but then that's why all the stuff is tasted, at least in the French competitions, as opposed to the ACF events--and taste actually counts more--upwards of 60% in some of these French-based events. So no matter how clean, how mechanical, how efficient, how artistic, how innovative, how soulful-seeming--taste is still the determinant. Then you conclude with: "The last factor would be my inability to ever taste such dishes due to either their price, or the rarity of their ingredients for the home cooking attempt." Again, I see that as an errant presumption, Mike. This isn't Iron Chef where the challengers open tins of caviar as often as you or I open cans of tuna. Most competitors earn less and are as financially encumbered as any typical home cook. For one competition we built a cake around caramel--mousse, cream, gelee, caramelized nuts--can't get cheaper or more accessible than burnt sugar, can you? Cheap plain ingredients abound. To bring this briefly back to the Canadian angle, the pastry chefs who competed for Canada used Inniskillin icewine in one of their desserts--Inniskillin was a team sponsor--and granted the wine isn't cheap--but it certainly is readily accessible, even here in the US. And given the price of Austrian and German icewines Inniskillin actually represents a culinary value--a bargain--given its quality. The most expensive ingredients--say fine chocolates--are also readily accessible to home cooks and often less than you'd pay for steak down at the mini-Mart and certainly less expensive than an organic free range farmer's market artisanal humane steak. None of this seems valid to me when used to diminsh one's sense of appreciation of the competitive attempt.

This comment struck the eGulleteer in me, though: "You're out of luck, though, if you hope to book a table after 6:30 p.m.; Zaytinya doesn't take reservations for any later, a policy I find inhospitable in this otherwise gracious dining room." I'm not sure I view this policy as any more or less inhospitable than other options. What say the rest of you? It's interesting you mention the weekly online chats Tom sits down for--he really walks a tightrope with those, at times exposing himself more than any other restaurant critic I'm aware of. He's nice, sincere and actually reads and responds to viewer e-mails. Phyllis Richman, Tom's predecessor, inaugurated this interaction. It's one thing they--and the Washington Post group--have done right for some time. Here's the link to Tom's chat archive if anyone is interested: http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-srv/liveo...od/sietsema.htm

Try to PM me when you plan to come. Lately I've been spending most of my time and mental energy down the street at one of Jose's other restaurants, Cafe Atlantico, creating a dynamic dessert program there to complement the contemporary Latin savory stylings of Jose and Kats (Katsuya Fukushima--who most recently cooked at Verbena in NYC and before that, El Bulli.) So I'm knee deep in plaintain powder and masa instead of phyllo and semolina. At Zaytinya, that date dessert is my personal favorite--and the most "creative," most labor-intensive dessert on the menu. We have cases of these beautiful jumbo Medjool dates flown in just for us from a farm in California, who otherwise sends most of their product to Japan. No one else in the city uses Jumbo grade--the largest, texturally most select, sweetest dates--presumably because they are too expensive. $55 a case for jumbo Medjools versus $46 for "large"--the next quality grade down--and none of the regular channel produce vendors even carry jumbos. We get them direct from the farm because even the "larges" from the produce wholesalers tended to be old, dried and dessicated. A real bitch to peel. We briefly roast these fat meaty dates in a Greek vin santo with muscovado sugar, cinnamon, cardamom, orange zest--to loosen the skins--then peel them--a real chore--and reduce the liquid to a sauce consistency. Three of these dates are arranged on top of some crumbled shortbread, which is on top of a thin layer of pistachio cream poured into a shallow bowl. A drizzle of the date reduction, the olive oil ice cream (made in the PacoJet) a drizzle of the unfiltered Greek evoo itself and a sprinkle of ground pistachio, candied orange rind and fleur de sel completes the dish. That we're even trying to do a dessert like this in volume--and at that price point of $6 is really a testament to my team and the support of a chef-owner-visionary like Jose Andres (and his partners Roberto Alvarez and Rob Wilder.) But that was also before this review came out, so we'll see how we do when volume increases. I'll change it if the prep or plating consistency slips in any way. And yes, Tom was very generous to me and Jose and the whole team behind the project. (By the way, Michel Richard was in Cafe for lunch yesterday and unbeknownst to me Kats served him the test version of one of the new desserts--a jiggly coconut panna cotta with mango salad in a vanilla-lime jus. The glasses came back scraped clean so we're off to a good start.)

Here's my short Kitchenaid summary--I have many of the attachments, the food mill, sausage grinder and stuffer, but have never used them. I have only used the juicer attachment, maybe 10 years ago, and it works with citrus fairly well. However, my real experience with the machines is as stand mixers--as I guess most people use them. Though K-aid seems to be coming out with bigger more colorful more powerful models all the time--there still seem to be 3 basic choices--1) the kind where the bowl attaches at the bottom and the mixer head tilts back (least expensive, least good) 2) the kind where the 5 Qt. bowl attaches on an arm which can be raised and lowered with a lever (most common, more expensive, around 325-350 watts but very very good and reliable) and then 3) a slightly larger model, more "powerful" still with the lever, but with a larger, wider bowl. We own a few of the older #2 K5A/K5SS models and they are great, all you could ever need in a small stand mixer, equally good with dough hook, paddle and whip--and we were also given an Epicurean--the newer larger #3 model. Let's say it's 6 quarts. After using it for a while, I don't like it. It stays up on the shelf. The timing and controls are off--inherently sluggish, in the sense the gears and speeds don't shift as well--plus you have to recalibrate all your recipes to larger batches--and face it, some things don't do well in a large bowl in small amounts. And it's just a sense, but I think the quality control has slipped in the newer, larger models. Bigger isn't necessarily better. If you can tolerate that--and you feel you'd gain by being able to do larger batches of cake batter or need larger amounts of whipped creams or meringues, fine. But I think you might actually find it harder to do pastry things well with this larger bowl size. Some bread guys I know advocate higher wattage and models like Kenwood and of course pastry pros use Hobart in their shops--but their needs are different. Just be forewarned there is more bitching and moaning on the web about how new Kitchenaids are not as reliable as old. So you might want to read around. Apart from volume, maybe others could speak to what the added power of some of the professional models bring to the table, but our K5's have been indestructible in demanding use by professionals and would be perfect for the home cook. Around $200 seems a very fair price to pay for such a workhorse that will last a decade at least.

How do you plan to use it? What kinds of things are you baking now?

In case anyone was curious: http://eg.washingtonpost.com/profile/10791...ext=restaurants

The big windows at the Bethesda location swing open Bux--quite nice in warmer weather--when you don't want to sit on the very nice sidewalk patio and risk getting rained on. The main difference between the two is the feel of the inside space--the ambience. Bethesda is bigger and feels more expansive; DC is smaller, glass-sided but don't open and it feels more constrained. DC seems to have the more happening, stylish crowd--rubbing up against each other when it's hopping, but that's just based on appearance and hardly valid. Bethesda has a bigger, newer kitchen and tends to run more "plancha" seafood specials. The food is comparably good, so are the award-winning wine lists with gems from Spain and South America. Good restaurants in Bethesda seem like an oasis in the desert; in DC there is so much competition. For Jaleo to remain packed, to remain valid in DC is quite an accomplishment with so much going on around it--within two blocks are Cafe Atlantico, Poste and Zaytinya, among others.

Oraklet--tell us more about your machine, because that put it in the freezer and stir every quarter hour method, well, frankly isn't ever going to produce ice cream. Granite, maybe, can be made quite well without an ice cream machine--by putting a water/sugar/fruit mixture in the freezer, allowing it to partially freeze and then stirring it up--and then repeating. But for ice cream, you need an ice cream machine. And a good one. Describe your process with the Phillips and the whipped cream as well. Sounds interesting and more like a frozen parfait--again, a different animal from ice cream. In fact, many people might experience more success with parfaits--with frozen dessert alternatives to ice cream--at home--than they would with ice cream. An interesting angle Oraklet. And yet there will be some who will still wonder why "recipes" don't seem to work--even given the lack of understanding or agreement of terms and techniques and equipment issues--the lack of a critical mass if you will. We're seeing on this thread that there is confusion surrounding even the simplest of terms--and this shared language has to come before you can get into comparing recipes or looking for the magical perfect Haagen Daz recipe. In fact, one might question the wisdom of trying to emulate Haagen Dazs at all.

No oraklet, you misunderstand additives. Additives are used in commercial ice creams and sorbets--are perfectly natural, not harmful--and if used skillfully are undetectable. (Of course commercial ice creams can be gummed up or tricked up as dietary or cost cutting measures as well.) I can't speak of Denmark, but in the US just read an ice cream or sorbet label. That's how it can be frozen for so long, packaged and shipped and stocked into freezer display cases--taken home and left in your freezer at home--and yet still remain perfectly soft and scoopable. Buy a pint of Haagen Daz Vanilla Swiss Almond or Mango sorbet or whatever and post the ingredients exactly as they appear, in order, and we'll compare. When I first started playing with ice creams I used "Frozen Desserts" by Caroline Liddell and Robin Weir. I still recommend it for beginners. There's also a nice chapter on sorbet in Harold McGee's "The Curious Cook" when you decide to start playing around with sorbet--a different animal from ice cream. These are good for home cooks. You have to turn to more advanced sources--and more advanced pastry chefs--to start to get a handle on the role different sugars and stabilizers can play in ice creams and sorbets--how to achieve more precision by using tools like a refractometer--and how you have to modify your recipes for the type of ice cream freezer you have, say for a PacoJet. This more advanced approach is still being written and isn't widely shared or available to pros yet either. In the industry and among food writers and cookbook authors there is resistance to this--it's seen as too complicated to understand and/or un-neccesary--what could be better than simple pure ingredients combined and churned simply? That's the approach you'd be wise to start with at home, simple recipes repeated and tasted. Even with an inexpensive machine these batches should still come out good, and yet you can't even do that without acquiring some minimal basic science first--like understanding why and how you have to cook a creme anglaise to 175-180 F. Well, as all of you who have tried to make ice creams at home--you know it ain't so simple. In fact, the more you dig into it the more you'll discover making ice creams and sorbets is far from simple, quite scientific but after an investment of time, quite rewarding.

Anna--what you're noticing may just be a function of your machine--super-cooling (i.e. freezing) your liquid mixture against the core too quickly--and never actually getting churned evenly. It might just be poorly designed and engineered but then I don't know how expensive the machine is. If it is a self-contained cooling unit--i.e. expensive--just don't pre-chill your bowl as much before adding your mix next time; if it is a removable core try adding slightly more mix and add it all at once. That's the job of the dasher--to scrape down the walls. It also could be alot of other things, including a mix not properly integrated and homogenized. When your mix is chilled overnight to cure--always stir it up before pouring in and freezing. I know, seems obvious. Be careful adding pectin or other stabilizers--depending on your ingredients--even a teaspoon can make the end product taste "gummy." And being concerned with this stuff can tend to put the cart before the horse, needlessly complicating something that should be simple and accessible as a beginner experimenting. You chill your mix before freezing for several reasons--the main one being so your machine doesn't over-work your mix as wingding said--that over-churning or spinning too long is what can give you that slight (or severe) graininess. It also can happen if your recipe is "overfat" to begin with. If you have the cheapo $50 removeable core machines and try to chill a warm mix you'll have to wait for another day, for the core to re-freeze after you've turned your mix to slush and no farther. Oh, and "ice cream" can and often does contain egg. To get the Haagen Daz experience you have to acquire some of the knowledge of food and dairy scientists, and be especially knowledgeable of things like guar gum, carrageenan, carob, pectin and all sorts of other perfectly natural, perfectly safe additives and stabilizers. It's beyond most professional pastry chefs and certainly beyond most home cooks. And this element--the pectin-type addition--comes mainly into play when you consider storage--how an ice cream is held in the freezer from a few hours old to several days--that's where the "stabilizer" works its magic interfering chemically with water and fat bonds to prevent crystallization. At home you don't need to worry about this aspect--churn fresh and eat. This is also why the old-style pastry chefs--who haven't quite gotten with the science aspect of this--melt and re-freeze their ice creams from the day before--and re-spin before the next day's service. The answer to most of the how and why questions lie with first coming to understand, as Wingding said, the properties of the yolk and sugar in a "recipe"--what happens when you cook a creme anglaise--and then use that for an ice cream. Then you can start manipulating fat content. The last element--and an insignificant one for home cooks--will be using these stabilizers. And for me, the only "true" ice creams begin with a creme anglaise base--though many seem to be scared off this style, it gives mouthfeel, richness, depth and creaminess. I know there are fans of ice cream and frozen dairy without egg--I'm just not one of them. It's a different product. But then it helps to keep in mind that the world of frozen desserts has many categories, styles, effects, etc. It's a big sliding scale with a lot of room for different textures and taste sensations.

And now for something completely different...I sense, Suzanne, if you were to write your recipe piece I'd play the bad cop to your good cop--or good cop to your bad cop. I think too many people expect too much of recipes and of recipe writers. Recipes aren't that important. (And I think what turns most people off about cooking is that good cooking takes time and effort and appreciation--it takes more than assembling a few killer recipes which "work"--it takes repeating your efforts time and time again and tasting, tasting each time--all things increasingly in shorter supply. But that's another thread.) Ask yourself this--do you think the best home cooks, our mothers and our mother's mothers had better recipes? Hardly. Do you think the best chefs and restaurants are such because they cook from great recipes? Again, hardly. I think that Thorne quote goes one step in the right direction with recipes--recognizing that we all taste dishes with different palates. But I'm not sure that goes far enough to debunk this recipe myth, what I see as a false promise the recipe concept continues to hold over so many American cooks--as if recipes are the key to understanding food and cooking. I wonder if all those who lament if only recipes were written better, if only authors tested their recipes better, were more specific but not too tedious, more clear but not too simplistic, etc.--would actually cook better and more consistently if you all got what you asked for. It's a familiar refrain. How valid, I'm not sure. Mamster is the closest to capturing how I think I feel on this. Anna N. said "But a poorly written recipe sets me up for failure and that's where I want to see improvements." I say, gently, you might be setting yourself up for failure. Learn to cook first--learn that cooking is not clear and unambiguous--come to understand the basic principles and techniques and ingredients of cooking first, and lessen your reliance on recipes, approach cooking from the perspective that recipes aren't what is really important--what is important is what you know--then you won't care how poorly or professionally recipes are written. You'll be so empowered you won't feel you need the precision and won't care about supposedly poorly written recipes. A recipe is not your instructor and is not a quick substitute for wisdom--it's not inherently a large life lesson--it's not meant to convey what you need to understand about the hows and whys and differences of ingredients--or time or temperature or flavor or palate or on and on. How realistic is it to expect recipes to fill in all the possible gaps of your knowledge and experience--which you bring to the table along with said recipe--and also those gaps or weaknesses of all other cooks? Recipes are a necessary evil--but like all evils need to be kept in check. How? You do need to spend time with good books--yes, which include recipes, with good cooks and chefs, and with good food writers who have more to offer you than another recipe--so you understand process, form, technique, concepts, tradition and science. You'll also find them chatting on eGullet, writing in the pages of magazines like Vogue and Elle, writing for newspaper food sections--though newspapers are certainly big culprits in promulgating the recipe myth. I think outside of actual errors or mistakes in recipes, and following along msp's excellent outline, most recipes are fairly acceptably well-written. They're recipes. Just recipes. And by faulting recipes, what you're really doing is finding fault with the way you approach food and cooking--you're placing too much emphasis on them and not enough on yourself and your culpability in this. What we need is more clarity in the value of instruction, of acquiring and sharing valuable information BEFORE you approach the recipe--any recipe--and more cooks taking the time to read and study and learn and embrace wholly apart from engaging recipes. In short, we need to become more recipe-averse.

Yes Jin, and Food Network Canada also produced a special on the US and Canadian teams at the most recent World Cup in Lyon--when the US won. I've seen that on the schedule several times a year. Here's another article to further complicate the Canadian scene: http://www.cfcc.ca/news/viewnews.asp

Jason, you'll be comforted then by the CD-ROM--you can select either language!

Some info about competitions and a possible rant coming. Nothing like folks tainting competitions with a broad brush who have neither the skill, courage nor experience to speak knowledgeably of them. Remember, I warned you to avert your eyes. First off, the initial article linked to was not a very well-written one. "Winning bronze" in competition parlance--especially ACF-style competitions as this seems to be--could mean one person won a bronze medal in one sub-category, say for a garde manger platter--while the overall team did poorly. One other link above said the overall team medals were Switzerland, USA, Germany I think-which of course is another give away that this was an ACF competition, because it seems the French weren't there competing. ACF competitions usually involve the kind of chefs who list initials after their names, like CMC, CEC, etc. The French--and those French-leaning anti-ACF artistic American chefs like me--don't do the "ACF" thing--and the only initials that count for the French are MOF. This event and the Culinary Olympics in Germany exist on a parallel, lesser in my opinion, but separate track to the competitions the French DO deign to compete in: the Bocuse d'Or, the Pastry World Cup in Lyon and the US World and National Pastry Championships (now in Vegas.) A US team which got some mention in one of those links is the Army team--and even by mundane, conservative ACF standards--there are far better ACF teams which could have been sent by the US. I've met many of these competing ACF chefs and pastry chefs and some are quite talented, quite dedicated to their real jobs in restaurants, hotels or teaching. Many of them are essentially unknown, out of the glossy media limelight, stuck in foodservice jobs somewhere at country clubs or resorts. Granted, Coop, it is hard to compete if you are a "real" restaurant chef, but some do. Some run restaurants within hotels, the Ritz chain is a good example of this, and as a result of that structure and staff, are supported by their hotel in national and international competitions. Another thing--sometimes for these ACF competitions there are "National" teams--which are the only ones eligible for the top medals--and then a country could also send lesser "regional" teams if the teams raise enough money--which usually consist of chefs who failed to make the cut for the "best" team--the National team. I'm unsure whether the team from Ontario was the only Canadian team competing, but it would be interesting to know what winning bronze actually meant and also know whether there were other Canadian teams and how this team did in comparison. Again, the article was vague--but in any event, Oh and his team deserve tons of credit for taking a risk, for flying halfway across the world, and trying to work under time pressure in a strange environment. Bronze itself may also be misleading--bronze does not necessarily mean third place--in ACF style competitions, you win Gold/Silver or Bronze as judged against some hypothetical objective standard of perfection--so it is possible for several teams or competitors within the same category to win "Gold." The highest Gold wins first, second-highest gold second place, and so on. It is also possible the first place competitor may only have done well enough to earn a bronze--yet he would "win" the competition. In an ACF competition, winning a Bronze actually sucks. My guess is the overall team winners the Swiss, USA and Germans won slews of Golds each. (In my very first ACF competition I "won" two Gold medals based on this supposed standard of perfection and said, how hard could this ACF stuff really be?) Why do chefs compete? It's simultaneously a way to learn and to give back, so others might learn. But why question the personal motivation of all these un-named un-real others Coop? Why question whether someone goes to cooking school, stages in France or takes their first job working in a Howard Johnsons? The answers can be layered and textured or as simple as they might seem on the surface. Why did I compete in my first ACF competition? Well, I was 2 years out of school, had experienced the daily grind of doing the same thing over and over again and wanted to test myself against my peers--to see if I could handle the pressure and for an excuse to display some creative work--and have some judges with much more experience than me comment on it. Ego? Sure, but I knew I was good, I wanted to start seeing how good and have that determined objectively. I was never afraid of being judged by others--or to fail publicly--and maybe that is why I have no problems working as a restaurant chef or being judged by critics. Every dish is judged by every diner--and every dish should be the best that it can be in a given situation--and your skills and creativity are what you have to draw on when stuff goes wrong, when ingredients are missing, when time is running out. All of that is re-inforced by the elite competitions. Plus, competing is a great way to network, land sponsors, get consulting gigs, to get you out of your own kitchen, to travel, to learn how to conduct yourself in media interviews and to engage the world at large--not bad things for a chef. You also win money. Now, looking past how it may be hard to understand why chefs compete, and toward Coop's comment that no real or really talented chefs (or presumably pastry chefs) "compete" at these type of things or that these events are phony or about ego--well, tell that to the very real pastry chefs of Le Cirque, Cafe Boulud, the Bellagio, the St. Regis, The Phoenician Resort, to name just a few off the top of my head from 2001 or this year, 2002, with the two "American" French MOF's who work at the top two elite Vegas hotels who just won $50,000 at the World Pastry Team Championships in Vegas, beating two "French" French MOF's team France sent over, who came in second and the Belgians who came in third. These guys are among the best in the world--don't take my word for it, if you knew what high quality pastry work was you'd know these guys rocked simply by looking at the work--let alone tasting it--and that that work might only be surpassed possibly by a few of their judges, which included the likes of Alberto Adria and Olivier Bajard. (They served as coaches of their respective teams, Spain and France.) Coop--do you think Alberto Adria would get involved, coaching Spanish chefs who are phony? (A timeout--MOF is an elite French designation bestowed upon only a handful of French chefs, pastry chefs and chocolatiers every few years by other MOF's to recognize their supreme skills and ability in their craft. It is held to be the most serious culinary honor in their world. It is the ultimate good old boy network--lessening somewhat in importance now--but still an elite and exclusive club. Some world-class chefs, like Roland Mesnier the current White House pastry chef, strived and competed their whole lives to earn the MOF title and failed, repeatedly. Now he's a bitter older pastry chef waiting to retire. One of the best--if not the most well-rounded--of younger American pastry chefs, Jacquy Pfeiffer in Chicago, tried out for the MOF two years ago and didn't make it. To the French, trying out for the MOF is seen as the ultimate "competition," so the fact that there were 5 or 6 MOF's lured back to compete in this recent US Pastry Championship is really quite amazing on a global level. And, all those guys run patisseries or shops back home--they don't have a soft, cushy life.) Actually, citing ego at all is a bit clueless, a canard--alot of real-world non-competition cooking is certainly about ego (I know chefs who do volunteer work out of ego and the press clippings it would generate) chefs and restaurateurs "compete" daily, and these formal competitive events can be as personal, as rewarding, as political as any daily grind, about setting goals and putting yourself under pressure and then accomplishing more than you thought possible--except on a larger stage, with thousands of people watching you work live and filmed by television crews the entire time. There is a frisson that exists when you are out there alone for the world to see--working live and all your mistakes and skills and weaknesses are visible in real time--and then captured by, say, the Food Network, for posterity, to be played and replayed as your showpiece happens to collapse, as a year of your practice time, perfecting your bench skills and mechanics, has just collapsed right in front of you--and your peers and your family. I know, I've been there, captured for posterity, and seen friends pieces collapse alongside me, seen the ingenuity of some trying to save their beautifully artistically carved and sculpted chocolate pieces from melting by blowing dry ice over them with little fans. But then I recognize that there is an artistic side to food and cooking that is valuable in and of itself. I've also seen a rapt public, the gleam in little kid's eyes as they're exposed to such fine work--the scope of which was previously unseen in whichever community or province they're from. It's called raising awareness, and it's all good. That little kid might one day grow up to become a creative chef, with eyes open, the next Ferran Adria possibly, all because he didn't have blinders on, and he saw something he marvelled at. I'm glad you backtracked a bit Coop, when it turned out you had heard of a decent Canadian chef who competed. The minute any chef starts defining what all real chefs do or opining about what all real chefs want is, well, the minute said chef loses a little more of his credibility. Oh, and by the way, in the elite competitions like the three I mentioned above, all of your work is tasted and brutally compared by the judges. Your every action is scrutinized by "work" judges grading your cleanliness, logic, organization and speed. You do it all in front of them. How'd you like to have Alberto Adria--the person unequivocably recognized as the best restaurant plated dessert chef in the world--taste a plated dessert of yours? Scary thought, I know, from first hand experience. Phony? Hardly. Competitions are like anything else in food and cooking--you aren't a good chef because you went to school, you won a medal, get mentioned in magazines, get on FoodTV, have written a book, have supposedly "paid your dues," have worked at X and Y famous restaurant, etc. None of that means you can cook or create. You either can or you can't. End of story.

You can also get it here: http://www.libreriagastronomica.com/enter.html

Thank you for posting that link Helena, I wondered if it was online. Unfortunately what you don't get a sense of online are all the beautiful pictures, stylishly shot, as representative of the cooking as the text. My favorite line from the piece, the one Cab quoted above from Abellan at Comerc 24: "I don't want to be super creative; I want to be medium-creative." Second favorite: "Catalans have almost as many words for squid as the Eskimos do for snow."

No, Bux, the CD-ROM is completely self-contained--beautifully, stylishly extant--though a "web help" link is still under construction--besides containing alot of bonus stuff as Robert described (and not wishing to steal Robert's or Bourdain's thunder since they probably haven't been able to view the CD-ROM yet) it has all the recipes, images, searchable and indexed by every sort of determinant--you can move your cursor over micro-thumbnails of every dish from 1998 say--see a larger thumbnail and if the description or image interests you, click on it and you're presented with the full recipe and process, even printing it out. You can call up specific lists--say of all cold espumas or all hot gelatins used in the four year period--and use that as an jumping off point if you so choose. In short, alot of work went into the production and organization of this so that the user can customize his own experience and define how he interacts with the work. It is a liberating anti-cookbook, the cookbook to end all cookbooks, much like Ferran's philosophy of cooking and eating. The "look" and feel of the CD-ROM, though, will seem familiar to anyone who has navigated the El Bulli media website. A good point, Bux--Barcelona may rule, but why it rules might becoming a bit more clear. You can't even begin to discuss Barcelona without discussing Adria first. I think chefs implicitly understand this. Lubow at least gets that right in his "Barcelona--Way Beyond Tapas" article mentioned on that other thread.

Short answers are either "no," or " it depends--it's more complicated than that." What we might come to understand is just how much El Bulli-esque stuff we're already seeing, how much the Trotters and Kellers of the country have "emulated" stuff Adria has already done--stuff previously thought isolated up a winding road in a country off the beaten path and out of the US media limelight. And it isn't like adding a foam to a dish makes it El Bulli-esque, that isn't Ferran's message and it's also not like that large bloc of chefs and cooks mailing it in around this country, serving up the majority of our conservative unadventurous uninteresting stuff--to an undemanding clientele--will even buy this book/CD-ROM to begin with. How many do you think have a CD-ROM drive and are comfortable using it? How many chefs are even comfortable typing on a computer keyboard? (Answer: not many.) But even if they did get their hands on this, it's not like this will shock them into caring about their jobs more or magically kindle some type of creativity from within. You either have talent and an open mind or you don't. It's also not like restaurateurs and owners are going to start supporting food like this--with better equipment, better training, better staffing--nor that the food media will all of a sudden realize this kind of cooking is special and interesting as opposed to a vanilla ice cream sundae or Alice Waters. Like in France, chefs in the US operate largely within a "tradition"--largely professional to be sure but conservative, a tradition of diminished creative expectation, of consistency, of maintaining the status quo, of concept or theme. What Adria teaches those willing to listen is that you don't have to cook or think conservatively within a tradition. That's why you're already starting to hear about all these other Spanish chefs who came up under Ferran's influence, under his freedom, doing interesting things in Barcelona and Spain. They all credit Ferran and realize if they grew up and cooked in France or America they would never be doing the things they're doing now--they wouldn't have realized it possible. Unlike France there is more freedom here--which is but one reason why so many good young French chefs and pastry chefs come here. I already see El Bulli-esque dishes and techniques all over the high end scene--not as often, if at all, in the unabashedly French places. (The French still try to work around and work within the "French" tradition somehow and very few are willing to be seen openly emulating Adria.) I also don't want you to underestimate the resistance toward Adria and the inertia of the typical American chef, both of which mitigate against noticeable change, at least in the short term. (Short term is easy, I'd have to think about what the effect might be long term.) Plus, when I've run into non-French chefs in New York in the past year, the two and three star chefs and pastry chefs who you might think would be the most open to what Ferran and Alberto have to teach--I hear from them that their customers "are not ready" for El Bulli-esque dishes. What they're really intimating is that we have no tradition to support such a view of cooking and eating--that in fact, our tradition augurs against it. So we'll see. You certainly aren't going to see it at the mundane CIA and Johnson & Wales level--the ACF-types have too much of a vested interest in maintaining the foodservice status quo, you aren't ever going to see it at the hotel level below an occasional trend-spotting W or an isolated Ritz, since business travellers are safe and conservative and so too are F & B directors. You might not see too much even on the restaurant level in NYC since the four-stars, which command the most media supplication, are all French. You'll probably see the influence in places you'd least expect: 1) in small chef-owned, chef-driven restaurants like a "Blue Hill" in NYC or a "Django" in Philly, 2) in cities like Philadelphia, Chicago, Boston, DC, 3) from chefs who aren't the product of rigid "French training" or the CIA but who are open to all influences--like eGulleteers Patrice Demers and Michael Laiskonis, 4) from chefs without a publicist, without the ear or much fear of a local reviewer and without investors to answer to. Those chefs who have a publicist, know the reviewers and have investors aren't likely to change their safe style or approach. In fact, it's now possible those American chefs of some stature, like a Bouley, who so charitably "emulate" Ferran and Albert Adria's dishes may just have to remove their more blatantly El Bulli-esque dishes for fear now of being found out.

Talk about raising the bar higher. Well, it's 120 Euros plus whatever extra for shipping, customs and taxes if you order it online. I think it would be about $170 total. Patrice Demers told me he received his in about a week from Librarie Gastronomie. (I paid more than this many years ago for Roellinger's book from Kitchen Arts & Letters, which, at the time, was considered an excellent book--all the better French chefs tried to get their hands on it.) I haven't even opened the book yet, Robert, the CD-ROM is that captivating. It's been in my laptop nonstop for the past few days, I've been carrying it to the restaurants each day and more than anything else it demonstrates what not following tradition, what daring, what innovation is all about. It should redefine what anyone thought they knew about "interesting" food and cooking--and no one working their way through the dishes will be able to look at whoever their favorite-admired-beloved chef may be the same way again. There are trendsetters I suppose on the culinary scene; Adria is not one of them. As I've said all along, Adria is beyond trend. Let the re-assessment of Adria, and his influence, begin. Good thing that the "Chef of the Century" thread can't be edited anymore. I'd find it interesting for you to briefly compare the effect the two recent, massive Ducasse books had on you as well, Robert, in light of this project. To me, they beg for comparison on so many levels. Perhaps your most provocative statement is "Such detailed elaboration of a culinary “oeuvre” makes sense and interesting reading only coming from Adria. If a chef with the stature of other trendsetters (Bras, Gagnaire, Veyrat?) were to attempt something comparable, I suspect it would look like not much more than self-aggrandizement" I'm curious--did the large scale Ducasse books seem self-aggrandizing to you--and looking past Ducasse, why do you already sense you wouldn't perceive similarly-styled works by Bras/Gagnaire/Veyrat as interesting? After say one year of dishes, after the tricks or trucs or strange ingredient combinations are revealed and you go "that's interesting"--do you fear you'd find yourself saying--ok, so what? Is that it? I've seen that before at the French Laundry, I see that at Blue Hill or Union Pacific, that's nothing new or nothing special? (I'm also not sure I'd be as comfortable lumping Bras in as a trendsetter anyway, as he has several very revealing, very thoughtful books under his belt, out for awhile now. Those books encourage me to think a more extensively cataloged, more extensively explained treatment would serve Bras--and us--very well indeed.) Would you fear a Keller work like this might appear self-aggrandizing? Regardless, in this Adria collection I have such a hard time finding a picture or recipe or juxtoposition or phrase that doesn't surprise, doesn't broaden, doesn't stretch what you thought you knew.

It doesn't matter how many people attend restaurants to be teased and shocked Tony, for if they did they'd be just a culpable as the dinosaur/traditionalists looking only for familiar dishes or the "presumed best ingredients prepared simply without alot of overt technique applied" crowd reveling in Chez Panisse--all of them as diners are missing the overall point--appreciating things for what they are, living in that moment, enjoying and experiencing that dish. (Robert--have you read the Slate diary this week by Mark Furstenberg?)

JD--Steve P. is possibly referring to other posts of mine where I've talked about Ferran and the fact that he's unafraid to use canned corn in a particular dish because after he "applies technique"--to use the amusing language of this thread--it gives him the best end result versus all other options in that application. He's skilled and thoughtful and experienced and scientific and well-read and has an open mind and palate to figure out what to do with all sorts of ingredients--supposed Alice quality and supposed supermarket quality--and use them all when need be. For a good chef this isn't covering up for inferior ingredients and it really doesn't require much experience or much understanding of food to appreciate the difference. Better chefs make better dishes. If it is done well it is seamless--you taste the dish first and then once it is in your mouth you may try to figure out how he did that, how he got what seems like a pure essence or pure manifestation of an ingredient. Then again, you might not--you might just enjoy the moment. Yes, it may have involved alot of "technique" but why should that have to be so transparent--as if applying techniques in some ways other than what you perceive to be "simple" is an inherent flaw? It's only an inherent flaw if after putting it your mouth it does not work--it doesn't taste really good--and then the techniques did not work or the chef's grasp of the value of those techniques--in service of creating his cuisine--let him down. Anything else on the part of the diner is just bias or self-limiting tunnel vision. (You see this in alot of the dinosaur/traditionalists, who are utterly incapable of appreciating things for what they are--and not what they wished them to be.) I guess if you did want to start an argument you could consider the fact that I think the best chefs can do both--they can appreciate and cook simply with the purest best most politically correct media approved artisanally foraged or grown ingredients--AND--they can still correctly determine the potential value or attributes in more mundane, less pristine ingredients like canned corn or a commercial goat cheese or dried apricots or a clump of regular old fresh supermarket basil--and they have a deeper reservoir of creativity, skills, techniques, knowledge and palate from which to draw on. Discussion of these two supposed camps--the ingredients vs. applying techniques--is almost inherently flawed, as Shaw in a previous post has done an amazing job laying out. Too often the naysayers--the traditonalists around here who say they prefer "simple" cooking or Italian cooking versus "French" cooking--are really talking about presentation or philosophy--how a dish "looks" when it is served and whether it looks like there was a lot of hand work that went into it or whether it looks like alot of effort and creativity and little steps went into it? I'd suggest relying on that visual assessment drives alot of this misunderstanding. One of the goals of the Adrias--and they have many goals--is to try to create things that taste more pure or more of themselves than you'd think possible--to use the freedom their culinary worldview provides them in order to tease or shock you into this realization--and this can be done with individual ingredients--textures or studies of a single ingredient--like pineapple--or this can be done with the way they deconstruct dishes--reworking the flavors and textures and ingredients of a dish--a clam chowder or a crema catalana flan--into something you wouldn't have thought possible. You taste pineapple which transcends any taste of pineapple you've had previously--which is the counter to the Alice Waters mythology which asks what could be better than a perfect raw pineapple? That is taken to be a rhetorical question according to the mantra; to Adria that is the jumping off point. Therein lies the real debate. Why should you care how much technique was applied to effect that end result anyway? Isn't that something you are imposing upon a dish unfairly? Do you determine your enjoyment of a dish by how big it is? I apologize for my wordiness, right now I have to get back to the El Bulli 1998-2002 CD-ROM and marvel at all the amazing ingredients.

An eGullet thread makes it onto the pages of Slate: http://slate.msn.com/?id=2075720 It even contains a "there's no accounting for taste, and wine criticism is subjective" to kick around.

And provide links to interesting work, especially visual: http://press.elbulli.com/scripts/fitxa.php...id_article=1657 Cab--here's a nice puff piece on Arzak and Adria which still manages to inform: http://press.elbulli.com/scripts/fitxa.php...id_article=1610

I remain glad that Grimes is reviewing again. I missed his voice, and his technique--not least of which is because he gets the importance of a pastry chef--he started mentioning pastry chefs by name more often than his predecessors--and as you see in this review, he captured (and conveyed) so much interest in a small amount of text, with bonus points for cute turns of phrase like the "Chloroseptic-green" scoop of sorbet, "packs the power of an entire box of Good & Plenty" and "it's a pastry chef's version of tough love." Tell me if you don't read this review and know exactly whether you're going to stick around for dessert? I think Bux's observations--that he is unsure Grimes actually enjoys eating and that he wishes Grimes conveyed more of that enjoyment in his reviews--might be open for debate--but you have to admire the process and the ability of this guy.

They do have a serious program Ben--but it is not "great" across the board. Breakfasts uniformly disappoint and you really have to search out an interesting lunch--most of the finer dining restaurants are dinner only. For lunch, you're probably best in Epcot--most notably Living Seas, then Canada or Japan. In fact, for dinner, perhaps only three restaurants have chefs, wine and service programs that I'd say were excellent or close to great right now--California Grill, Flying Fish and Living Seas--as of my recent visit in November 2002. (I haven't eaten at V & A--but that is regarded as the best on property.) Great is an over-used or misunderstood word, so I don't want to mislead you. Here's an old post of mine: http://forums.egullet.org/index.php?act=ST...=5627&hl=disney But there are unknown chefs at "lesser" restaurants, like in the Canada Pavilion at Epcot--not considered a prestige property--that can cook their ass off, create interesting wine pairings and do this in a volume restaurant, like Canada, in a theme park, open for lunch and dinner, and at a lesser price point. I asked the chef at Canada to cook us a tasting menu with wines by the glass when I was there in November and it rivalled anything I've had on property since I've started dining there--so over the past 3 years. So it was as good as when Cliff cooked at the California Grill (before he left for Darden.) This year we also had an excellent dinner from the menu at the Wilderness Lodge--a beautiful, understated and under-appreciated fine dining property. Lots of wine from Oregon and Washington State, new GM and new chef. They're on the rise as well. Jiko supposedly has improved since my disappointing meal there in 2001. I should also qualify this somewhat--I was dining at these restaurants as a known chef, and my wife and I were guest chefs of Disney ourselves--we were down there doing among other things a wine dinner with Chalk Hill and cooked with the new chef of the California Grill, John State. Most of the time we didn't order off the menu--instead asking the chefs at California Grill, Living Seas and Canada just to cook for us. But we made it clear we wanted their signature dishes, what they were most proud of, and to pair wines. Most of what we had were on menu--meaning our meals would be similar to what anyone ordering from the menu would receive--except our portions were smaller--and we had more of them. In the case of California Grill--we sat at one of the many chef's tables--really counters--like at a sushi bar--and where you can dine with full view into the impressive open kitchen, with different views depending on where you sit--sushi bar, cold station or pastry station. The best counter seats are just to the left of the passe. On your right you see everything going out, every ticket piling up, every screw up by the runners or sous chefs and right in front of you is one of the sushi chefs. I'd make priority reservations in advance--and follow up with the restaurant directly to specify these seats. And if any foodie is perhaps re-considering going to Disney as a result of my enthusiasm--I'd recommend you plan to visit during what they call the Epcot International Food & Wine Festival, which runs for several weeks in the Fall. The whole place is just abuzz with food and chefs and little tastings and seminars and special dinners--with a mix of guest chefs and chefs from property.