Seattle Food Geek

I was inspired by that episode as well. In fact, last night I tried to apply the same principle to a souffle. I overvacuumed and it collapsed :-(

In my first attempt, I tried to dehydrate the honey on a sheet of acetate for 15 hours at 135F. There was not much of an apparent difference in texture. I can try going for longer, but I think we may be onto something with the fiber binding. I'll try using a small amount of pectin - hopefully the bitterness won't overwhelm the flavor too much.

Good question - I left that out. Yes, it needs to be flexible, at least when it is warm. I'll need to fold it into a specific shape. (leaving out other details so I can surprise you with a photo of the dish when it finally works)

I'm looking for a way to dehydrate (or transform) honey into a sheet with similar properties to a fruit leather. I've been able to do this with sugary sauces like cocktail sauce or plum sauce just by spreading them on parchment and putting them in the dehydrator for a few hours. However, honey doesn't seem to change much. My guess is that I need to add some type of starch to help draw out the moisture, or use a gelling agent in some way. Ideally, the finished properties of the honey sheet are that it is stable at room temperature, not too sticky to the touch (I'm OK with coating it with a fine power to help with this) and that it will dissolve completely if stirred into hot water. Does anyone have experience or tips for this problem? Thanks, Scott

What a coincidence - I just created a dish that I think would work very well for your needs. It is a shrimp cocktail, but it looks like proscuitto- or bacon-wrapped shrimp. It is made by simply dehydrating cocktail sauce until it turns into a "leather", then wrapping it around the shrimp. The flavor of the cocktail sauce is completely unaltered, and the leather "melts" in your mouth. Simple preparation, cheap ingredients, served cold. It was born for a buffet that plays with perception :-)

Will the French, Spanish and German versions still include the references to Colonel Sanders and Chef Boyardee in the History section, or are there European equivalents to those titans of industrial food?

That does look like a pretty good starting point - thanks very much, all! I'll give it a shot, letting the sponge cool under vacuum pressure to increase the size of the bubbles. I'll also try a variation with isomalt. Thanks!

I have tried and failed several times to create a dish that I've had in mind for some time now. I'm looking for advice on how to achieve the texture I'm after. I want to make a hard-set sugar sponge with large (1/4") bubbles, resembling a honeycomb. I don't care about having the bubbles perfectly aligned - rather, I care about creating a texture that is very lightweight but brittle. I've seen techniques for aerated chocolate that result in the texture I want, but I haven't been able to apply them to sugar. What I've tried so far is melting wet sugar until it reaches hard-crack, then quickly adding it to a CO2 siphon, charging it, shooting it out into a vacuum canister, vacuuming to increase bubble size, and letting it set up. I always get stuck at the "shooting it out" part, because the sugar is far too thick to be expelled through my siphon. Usually, I just end up with a bunch of sugar laminated to the inside of my siphon and 2 days of soaking to clean. I've also tried heating isomalt and blowing bubbles into it. This was fun but futile. Is there a way that I can thin out the sugar, but still retain enough surface tension to hold bubbles, and still set up brittle when it cools? Or, is there some other way to achieve this texture with some type of sugar? Thanks in advance for any help you can provide!

I have been very fortunate to spend some time with the Modernist Cuisine team at their Bellevue kitchen. Some of the stories they've told me about the creation of the book were very suprising. I've compiled some of my favorite facts about the book's creation: 1.The working title of the book was How to Boil Distilled Water At Sea Level Using A Conductive Heat Source and a Wet Bulb Thermometer. It was later changed to Modernist Cuisine to conserve ink. 2.A month before the book went to print, the team decided to cut a 6th volume that described the physiology of the human body’s digestive process. 3.As lifelong fan of hidden clues and puzzle-solving, Nathan has placed a secret clue inside the printed pages of book 5. If you cut off the book in half vertically down the exact center and view each half from the side, the interior edge of the stacked pages reveals the recipe for Three-Course Dinner Chewing Gum. 4.The book originally included a recipe for Coca Cola, which the Modernist Cuisine team reverse-engineered using a mass spectrograph. However, efforts to recreate an edible aluminum can were problematic, and the recipe was ultimately discarded. 5.The iconic “cutaway” photos in the book were actually created using a prototype device that resembles a light saber. Intellectual Ventures has several working “light sabers” which it uses for testing defenses against (according to a research assistant) “pests significantly larger than a mosquito”. 6.During the book’s production, photographer Ryan Matthew Smith was asked to leave a Seattle restaurant after connecting a fiber optic strobe flash to his cell phone camera and tossing his meal in the air. Ultimately, the restaurant owner apologized and asked to purchase the photo. 7.One of the more famous recipes in the book is the Modernist Hamburger, which requires over 30 total hours and a bowl of liquid nitrogen to create. Unfortunately, the team decided to exclude their recipe for “2 AM Mini Hamburgers”, which was inspired during the teams extensive experiments with methods of smoking herbs. 8.The recipes in the book have clearly undergone rigorous testing. However, the extent of the tests is often greater than we realize. For example, one member of the culinary team spent four days measuring the number of licks it takes to get to the tootsie roll center of a Tootsie Pop. He concluded, applying the central limit theorem, that the number is three. 9.Although it is true that the genesis of the book was Nathan’s desire to understand sous vide cooking (and the corresponding thread on eGullet), it is not widely known that Nathan turned to sous vide because his microwave had broken and he needed a reliable way to reheat frozen taquitos. 10.If you were to sum the cooking time for all of the recipes (not including parametric variations) included in the books, the result would be 8 years, 2 months, 15 days and 9 hours. However, the book was completed in fewer than seven years, leading some to conclude that Nathan Myhrvold has secretly developed a time machine. I hope these facts have given you an inside look at the creation of Modernist Cuisine. And, as always, happy April fool’s day.

OK, dumb question time. If one of the primary purposes of ice in cocktails is to make them cold, why not use chilled spirits to begin with?

@nathanm was very kind to share with me some of his thoughts on sous vide cooking, modernist cuisine, and the upcoming book (now 2200+ pages in 4 volumes; expected release date December 2010). If you're interested, you can read the interview here.

@BadRabbit Awesome, thanks so much! Much more geeky stuff to come!

As long as we're on the subject, I figured I'd share my technique for pumpkin carving :-) The video below shows the 2nd pass of etching the poem "The Raven" into a pumpkin about 7" in diameter Below are a few examples of the other geeky pumpkins I've etched with the laser. Here's a link to a detailed paper I wrote on carving/etching pumpkins with a laser, in case you're interested. http://seattlefoodgeek.com/2009/10/how-to-carve-pumpkins-with-a-laser/

@LRunkle Thank you for bringing up this safety concern about laser use. The laser I'm using is an enclosed, computerized laser cutter, and the beam is focused to a precise point. The burning I've experienced generally occurs when the object being cut is thick - 1/4" or more - and the parts that burn are above or below the focal point. Admittedly, I'm far from an expert on cutting lasers so safety warnings like this are greatly appreciated!

Ha, I wish I had my own kitchen laser. I might finally be able to realize my vision of building a Frank Gehry gingerbread house :-) Thanks, all, for the warm welcome to eGullet! Looking forward to continued conversations.

I haven't worked with pastillage, but I think I may have to give it a shot. My guess is that the laser-cut edges will end up browned/burnt from the heat generated by cutting, but it's worth an experiment! I'll be sure to post my results.

I used a 30W CO2 computerized laser cutter. I don't know the model information off-hand, but suffice it to say that you don't need 30W to cut through nori :-)

This weekend I used a laser cutter to create a decorative garnish out of nori. I've experimented in the past with laser nori for makizushi, but with mixed results. Certain geometric patterns work well, but when the nori comes in contact with moisture, it becomes elastic and the patterns are distorted. The best results have been with box sushi. Anyhow, I think I found a good use of laser-cut nori in this dish. It's a duck consomme with a 1" thick round of sous vide potato. I found a Japanese maze pattern that I used for the nori design, and the whiteness of the potato round is a nice contrast against the dark seaweed. In case you're interested, the recipe is here: http://seattlefoodgeek.com/2010/04/duck-consomm-with-sous-vide-potato-laser-cut-nori/ Has anyone else been using lasers in the kitchen, for making garnishes or for cooking/cutting/searing food?