Baselerd

Just finished one of the plated desserts out of Eleven Madison Park: Roasted Banana Sorbet, Chocolate Custard, Sesame-aerated chocolate, black sesame paste, yuzu pate de fruit, yuzu-caramel fluid gel, chocolate tahini feuillutine, carmelized bananas, fried banana-tapioca tuile. Great, unique flavor combinations. As usual, my (lack of) quenelling skills is fairly evident.

I get the point and I'm crossing my fingers for you - not trying to be unhelpful but substituting proprietary starch and thickening ingredients is not as intuitive as substituting cashews for pine nuts. Different formulations can yield dramatically different results (depending on if you're using it for a binding agent for a baked good, sauce thickener, etc.), even among pregelatinized starches.

I don't think any of us will have the exact recipe for Wondra - it's a proprietary product. You could try experimenting by grinding low-protein flour and malt flour very finely, steaming, and re-drying it. I imagine it will end up causing you more of a headache than it's worth though. Not to be a parrot, but I really think your best bet is to spend the money and order some online.

I think the only significant difference will be the time required, but I could be wrong. The Modernist Cuisine alludes to Nils Noren and Dave Arnold developing the technique of speed alcohol infusion with a siphon, but mentions that it does not develop as many "flavor layers" as longer extractions with standard techniques.

I started by following the Modernist Cuisine parametric recipe for dehydrated produce by blending fresh pumpkin puree with 1% Xanthan Gum and 18% egg whites (by scaled mass, i.e. 100% = weight of pumpkin puree). I also added maybe another 20% confectioner's sugar to sweeten the puree. Next I spread the batter about 1/8 - 1/16" thick between two pieces of parchment paper, and set them in my dehydrator for 4-5 hours, removing the parchment paper about an hour and a half in (once it was no longer runny or sticking to the parchment). Unfortunately my dehydrator doesn't have temperature controls, but I think it runs pretty hot - maybe 145 F?

Recently made some sea bass. Prepared it two ways, sous vide (bound two filets together with Activa RM and cooked 115 F for 35 minutes) and microwave steamed (Out of focus in the pic, 700 W for ~2.5 minutes, with sauce in bag). Served with preserved lemons, cucumber, cilantro, and a thickened yuzu-soy sauce (Sabazu, Uchi cookbook). All in all both were delicious, the sous vide was definitely more appealing to me, it has a buttery/flakey texture almost like sushi.

Eh, well either way I used Pomona's for some spherification based off the MC "Gruyere Spheres". The recipe called for CP Kelco brand LM Pectin, but the Pomona's worked great. Using calcium lactate gluconate as an ion coagulant this produced some of the best spherification results I've had

I made the Sichuan Bok Choy recipe a few months ago from The Modernist Cuisine and it was pretty good. They were able to make straight up steamed baby bok choy very flavorful by pairing it with some Sichuan sauce, pickled Shiitake mushroom caps, pressure cooked sesame seeds, and chili oil.

Mix it with some red wine and beef stock to make a braising liquid?

I had fun making it and enjoyed eating it, so yea. But I would also say plenty of the other plated dishes in the MC volume 5 are just as good or better and require 1/3 the amount of prep. I chose this because it involved several components that involved new techniques or ingredients that I had never cooked with before. I cooked this one over the course of a week or so (starting with the 100-hour oxtail).

I recently made the pot au feu plated dish from the MC books (volume 5). Delicious, but probably the most work I've done for a meal ever. It included: SV Pickled Beef Tongue 100-hour oxtail Beef shank rilletes SV Rare flatiron steak (definitely going to make this again in another embodiment) SV celery root, carrots, turnips, and rutabaga Beignet of ravigote sauce Oxtail consomme Microwave fried parsley whew...

Not to make this any more convoluted, but does anyone have an idea of whether or not any of the common grocery store pectins are low methoxyl pectin? I suspect this is not the case, since most are interested in gelling in the presence of sugar, not calcium. However, the fact that Pomona's required the addition of calcium salts makes me wonder if it is LM pectin...

Thanks, I'll give it a try and see how it goes.

I decided to do a head-to-head comparison of microwave steamed vs. sous vide sea bass using the reccomended cook times in the book. Both of the filets were cooked with a bit of yuzu-soy-ginger-green onion sauce in the cooking vessel. Both of us preferred the sous vide sea bass (115 F for ~35 minutes), but the steamed was still very delicious. The sous vide variant had a texture somewhere between raw and steamed.

So I am planning on making one of the plated desserts from Eleven Madison Park, and one of the components of the dish is "sesame chocolate spray". Unfortunately I do not have a spray gun. My question is this: is there a good way to add these flavors using a different technique? Or a way to achieve a similar result with another tool? The recipe simply has you melt the following ingredients and add to a spray gun: 1 cup 66% chocolate, 1 cup cocoa butter, 1 Tbsp sesame oil I know I'm probably asking for something that doesn't exist ... I thought of using an olive oil mister, but I realize the pressure/shear force in a spray gun is orders of magnitude higher than that of the mister. I was wondering maybe if I just mixed the ingredients I could spread it like a paste, so I could still add the sesame chocolate flavor.

Not so sure with the culinary industry in particular, but I think with any profession it's much harder to get into a good position without a degree from an institution, regardless of whether or not you have the required skills.

Franklin's is awesome, albeit slightly overrated. You'll have to wait in line for a long time usually, and I've always felt Salt Lick was better anyway (and all you can eat).

I've never eaten at a Jose Andres restaurant, but Minibar seems very relevant and creative, which I can respect.

By far without a doubt in my mind you need a Sous Vide setup if you want to cook out of the Modernist Cuisine. If you skim through the book, you'll realize that most of the recipes use sous vide. As such, I would imagine it would be disappointing to lack that ability. I also strongly feel that of all the new techniques introduced in the book, sous vide has the most dramatic and practical improvements over standard cooking. Since getting into MC and SV, I've mostly been cooking meats in the sous vide for almost any recipe from any source. The ISI whip is a lot of fun, but definitely secondary to the Sous Vide equipment. Personally, I would go for a pressure cooker before a whipping siphon. If you're interested in gels then you'll probably need to buy some ingredients. It can be hard to make sense of all the ingredients - a lot of them only work in certain situations, etc. Many are non-substitutable. I've found that I've collected quite the library of these ingredients, but a few important ones that come to my mind with regard to MC are Agar, Xanthan gum, Carageenans, Gellans, Guar Gum, and Locust Bean Gum. There are many many more obviously, but I always seem to be coming back to those ones...

A bit out there - but I made a pumpkin-themed dessert. The main component was the pumpkin ice cream recipe from this blog. However, I pressure cooked the pumpkin (for the ice cream puree) with baking soda first to get it nice and caramelized. I also made a pumpkin wafer by dehydrating a mixture of fresh pumpkin puree, egg whites, confectioner's sugar, and xanthan gum (whip to foam then dehydrated). Cinnamon crumble and some pumpkin pie soda (Maine Root brand, very tasty) are also shown.

Yeah, using that hand pump might be more work than you think.

I half agree with you. I think they make two conclusions in that essay: 1.) The hydrophobic properties of oil help prevent water loss due to encapsulation of the food. I can buy this I suppose, as long as you guarantee the temperature is not high enough to generate steam within the food. I will say though that the qualitative assessment of dryer pork in the water-based preparation is hardly conclusive of this effect. I do agree though that their test was not as controlled as it could have been. Using sous vide bags definitely would eliminate possible sources of error such as evaporation. 2.) The higher specific heat capacity causes the water-based preparation to cook faster than the oil-based one. Here's where I agree with you slkinsey. As you mention, the burner can provide all the heat the oil or water needs to stay isothermal, so there is no shortage of energy in either preparation - provided there is enough volume of each liquid to keep the temperature reasonably stable. The real property of interest here is the thermal conductivity - a materials ability to conduct heat within itself and to other materials at the interface. In other words, a material with high thermal conductivity can transfer heat quickly and vise versa. Water has extremely high thermal conductivity - and a quick google search revealed that most cooking oils have less than half that of water. I think that in either case this should only affect the ramp-up time. Another factor I can think of is the viscosity of the oil and water. I can't imagine this being too much of a factor, but if the temperature of the cooking fluid is kept constant by natural convection then it is probable that the oil would be less efficient.

It doesn't make it taste better, it simply changes the texture. In fact, N-Zorbit is generally only added in amounts that has no detectable taste. If you want to add an oil-based flavor component to a dish but would rather have it as a light powder, N-Zorbit is the tool. These powders are extremely easy to make, but the flavor is essentially the exact same as the starting oil or fat. They do have a unique melt-in-your-mouth effervescence, which is both surprising and exciting to eat. I agree with what you seem to be hinting at - that these powders are overused. I can't say I don't enjoy them though, and it's a very subjective thing to assess.

I wonder why you have been having such difficulty with the carrot soup. There should be enough moisture in the cooker to prevent burning. I always like to heat the pressure cooker with no lid first just to melt the butter before adding all the ingredients. From my experience it doesn't hurt to give the pressure cooker a gentle shake every once in a while as well.

I don't know if it was "insanely popular" but I had superb results with that short rib dish in V5, the one with the tamarind glaze and the crispy beef salad garnish. If it's not insanely popular, it should be. I would have to agree here. I've cooked probably nearly a third of the plated dishes in book 5. My favorites were the braised Short Ribs (5-42) as mentioned and the Sunday Pork Belly (5-101). The Guinea Hen Tagine (5-135) and Osso Bucco Milanese (5-60) would be close runner ups.