nathanm

I agree....one might imagine that you could use some techinque like this to make a cheaper water bath for home use. However, the most likely way this will happen is a manufacturer will simply make a cost-reduced version of a standard lab water bath, with some corners cut. The home appliance market has very different volume and profit margin than lab equipment.

A hermetically sealed heat pipe system would certainly work

Responding to several posts here. Using a volitile material like ethanol or methanol is a very bad idea, because the fumes are flammable. So don't do this! Even if you found a low boiling point fluid, you would have to contend with the fumes caused by the evaporation. In many cases (including both ethanol and methanol) the fumes are toxic! You postulate a condensor loop to keep it a closed system but this is prone to leaks and could be dangerous. Plus, as you point out, most organic solvents will dissolve the plastic bag. There is no practical way to make a sous vide cooker with low boiling point fluids. You can find fluids that have a HIGHER boiling point than water - for example vegetable oil. In fact, a deep fat fryer is, in effect a "water" bath that uses oil instead of water. They generally have very poor temp control. Plus, you virtually never want to do sous vide above 212F because the bag will pop. Lab water baths use a PID temperature controller, which is a very accurate kind of thermostat that can do precise control. Crock pots have very simple, crude and not very precise on-off temp controllers that have a much wider range of variation. They have two problems - first they are not well calibrated - so it might be 160F or it might be 170F, no two crock pots even of the same make are likely to be calibrated exactly the same. The other problem is that there is a wide range of temperature variation in an on-off controller. So, a controller nominally set for 160F will usually go through a zig-zag, ranging from 155F to 165F, or even wider swings. Plus or minus 5 degrees is not uncommon - plus or minus 10 degrees is possible. This is considered good enough for slow cooking, but it is not good enough for many kinds of sous vide - particularly at the lower temperature ranges. If you want to do sous vide at the high temperature found in most crock pots, then you may be able to use it without modification. But you'll be locked into whatever temperature variation it has. Use a digital thermometer that records min / max to check this. Using a dimmer with a crock pot will not work. The dimmer will make the heating coil operate at lower temperature, but the thermostat will still be set at the factory set temperature! If the dimmer is very low then it won't reach that temp, but you will not have a theromostatic controlled result. So this idea is not going to work. But perhaps I misunderstood your post. Another way to do this is to take the high/low temperature setting of the crock pot, and then splicing in a potentiometer (dimmer) so that you can vary the temperature at which this works. This might work, but if you are that good an electronics hacker you don't need me to tell you about it . The main problem here is that it will still de a very crude on-off controller, and will likely have the same zig-zag temperature variations. It might work well enough, or it might not. Hard to say. One thread on eGullet (don't have it handy) covers somebody's homemade water bath plans, including some sort of temperature controller. I haven't built it, but you could look at that. One could imagine installing a PID or similar controller in a crock pot, but unless you are a skilled gadget hacker with a surplus PID lying around this is going to be more costly / time consuming than getting a surplus water bath on eBay. If you look on espresso websites there are discussions of adding PID control to an espresso machine, but I can't imagine how this could be worth it cost wise. I have seen a gizmo which is a PID or similar controller, with a plug socket, so you could plug in any heating coil and control it to reach a temp. However, again, I think that cost and so forth.

A crock pot will work to some degree. You won't have control over temperature however - it will be at whatever temp the crock pot is set at from the factory which is probably 150F to 170F. Also, they are not very accurate - instead of staying at a constant temp it will fluctuate. If you already have one, give it a try, but realize the limitations.

There are several good guides to alginate use available, such as from ISP or FMC or another from FMC In general you should consider using a sequestrant in mixing with the flavor before adding the gel. The sequestrant binds to calcium ions to prevent the mixture from gelling prematurely. Using de-ionized water is very helpful in this regard. Sodium citrate, or sodium hexametaphosphate are frequently used as sequestrants. The concentration used is very low. Gellan can also be made to gel with calcium in the same way as alginate - you need low acyl gellan. It would be a good idea to use a sequestrant to make sure there is no calcium in the flavor mix. In general Gellan is to be preferred over alginate in terms of texture and flavor release - it is far and away my favorite hydrocolloid for those reasons. Perhaps NhumiSD would like to comment since I think he works for CP Kelco, and is the real expert here. Calcium lactate is a better bet than calcium chloride since there is less of a flavor issue. You can also do the reverse process and put the calcium in the flavor solution, and drop into a bath of the gelling agent. There are some advantages to this - it is easier to maintain an liquid center this way. Again NhumiSD may want to comment.... Nathan

This could be done with Foodsaver bags, or sous vide bags which certainly can take the heat. Ziplock probably works reasonably well. Also, you can do it at lower tempertaure than a rolling boil, but you want to be at least 160F to get the egg to coagulate.

I have used a waterjet extensively in machine shop applications. An industrial water jet is not suitable for kitchen scale food processing. The water is pumped up to 55,000 pounds per square inch and shoots out the nozzle at mach 3. It will cut many materials with water alone, or for tougher materials garnet grit is blown into the jet and it hits the material to be cut at high speed. You can cut glass, steel, titanium, granite, wood - almost anything. An interesting application is that disposible paper diapers are cut with a waterjet. The reason is to avoid having shards from a metal blade get into the diaper. The diapers are shot past the waterjet so fast that they do not absorb water or get wet! Some waterjets are used in industrial food processes, but it would have to be a very unusal process to make a waterjet worthwhile. So you could cut food with them, but it really would not make sense. You need to cut over a tank of water, since that is what stops the jet - in a kitchen you could cut through the counters at the same time as the food! Indeed my granite counters were cut with a waterjet. Computer controlled water jet machines are $100K to $250K or even more.

Just to clarify, I assume you mean puffing occuring in storage, rather than any ballooning that might occur during cooking? Presumably the latter is almost inevitable without the aid of a pro-level (chamber-based) vac system? ← Correct - I mean puffing up during storage, not during cooking. During cooking the residual air in the bag (there always is some) heats up and expands so you will get some puffing due to this. If you seal with an edge-sealing vacuum machine this often happens because the vacuum you get is not all that great. If you heat the bag up near the boiling point of water you will certainly see it puff up due to steam. If the bag contains something with a low boiling point, like alchohol (boiling point 78C/ 172F) then you'll get puffing as you approach its boiling point. All of this is harmless. The problematic puffing occurs during storage of the bag. If the bag is reasonably tight after cooling, and later becomes puffy it means that something in the bag is generating gas, likely bacteria. In that case throw the bag out!

The CDC uses the term "outbreak" for a cluster of related cases, which can be as little as one. A "case" is an individual person being sick. So, if there were 5 cases it could be outbreak or 5 outbreaks if they occured separately. We would all be interested in learning of this sort of event, and I think it was helpful of docsconz to mention it in this thread. Until we have more details we don't know much more about it. Also it is interesting that the DOH recognizes that sous vide is not a bad technique, and is merely one they want to regulate.

This is correct, but there are ways to avoid this by "sequestering" the calcium ions using something like sodium hexametaphosphate as the sequestrant. That is requried for a number of hydrocolloids. This is discussed in several of the books on hydrocolloids referenced in various other threads.

Until this is docomunted I am very skeptical that the five botulism cases from sous vide mentioned in docsconz' post actually happened. They might have - but I searched extensively and have found nothing on the internet about it. The Center for Disease Control publishes reports on every outbreak worldwide - for example a botulism outbreak in Thailand in March 2006 from eating home-canned bamboo shoots, or one from Alaska in 2002 where people actually ate a beached whale carcass they found. The latter CDC report reaches this conclusion "Persons should avoid eating beached marine mammal carcasses". Gee, you think you can comply with that? I'm going to. Alaska is, per capita, the botulism capital of the US. From 1950 to 1996 there were 72 cases in Alaska, versus 12 in New York state, despite NY having a vastly larger population. Only California had more cases than Alaska at 85, but it is the most populous state, so on a per capita basis it falls way below Alaska. The reason Alaska is so high is that many traditional Native Alaskan foods are prone to botulism. This an other facts about botulism come from the CDC Botulism Handbook The CDC lists NO cases of botulism due to sous vide. Since they pretty much cover the world, I would be surprised if there are 5 recent cases that they don't know about, although of course that is possible. The CDC does not list any other illnesses caused by sous vide either, although they probably do not track mild cases of food poisining which are apt to go unreported. So, while botulism remains a serious theoretical concern for stored sous vide, I am not aware of any actual cases in practice. Nathan

The health authorities seem to disagree with you since conventional cooking rarely generates anaerobic pathogens ? Isnt botulism quite serious ? ← As we have repeated ad nauseum: - Sous vide that you cook and serve immediately has no botulism risk. - Sous vide that you cook and serve immediately has no greater risk than any other cooking method. You can mess up any method of course. - Sous vide that is stored between cooking and serving can have a botulism risk - but it is a much lower risk than say, home canning. You need to chill promptly after cooking, keep refridgerated during storage, and only store for a few days. - Health departments generally don't have a clue about the true dangers in food safety, they just have rules that they follow. They generally have no rules about sous vide one way or another, which leads to fear, uncertainty, doubt. - In NYC there was a health department crackdown based on their ignorance which has largely been reversed by having sous vide training for the health department. Nathan

Alginate is used in making onion rings, as well as a number of other "structured foods". The pimento strips that come stuffed in olives are very often made this way. "Cherries" for cherry pie are made this way too - it is very common in canned cherry pie filling, or mass market cherry pies. The same is often true of other fruit pieces. The advantage of doing it this was is perfect repeatability in size and shape. They puree the onion or fruit first, and this lets them use odds and ends and create perfect looknig results. In these applications more alginate is used, and more time in the calcium bath. In some cases calcium is mixed in rather than allowed to diffuse in from outside. Calcium lactate is a better source of calcium ions - you are much less likely to get a taste impact that calcium chloride.

The aluminum screens are famous. There are many theories about what they "really" do - including the theory that they don't do anything unusual but want to create an air of mystery. Natural or not, it is pretty damn good. The question about buynig their beans and trying it is interesting. Recently I tried two locations of Murky Coffee in Washington DC and Alexandria, VA. One of the locations had the Synesso machine, the other didn't. The shots were OK, and better than anything else I've had on the east coast, but nothing like Seattle, or Sant Eustache

Previous posts on this thread cover most of the sure fire stuff that I know, but here are some simple rules: - If you cook to a core temperature of 130F/54.4C or higher for long enough to meet the temperature vs time tables (in FDA documents I posted), then you are completely food safe for immediate consumption. The rough rule of thumb is the food has to reach 130F and stay there for 112 minutes (or longer). At higher temp the time is less - 12 minutes at 140F/60C. - If you cook below 130F and/or you cook for less time than in the food safety limit, then keep the total time between taking it out of the refridgerator and consuming it to 4 hours or less. Do not chill and store food cooked this way - It is always safer to eat immediately than to store sous vide. - However, it certainly seems safe to chill fast and store for a "short" period. A few days seems to work well for me. I can't honestly tell you what the limits are. Only chill and store sous vide that you have cooked to the food safety limits. Chill rapidly (plunge bag into ice water). - If a sous vide bag puffs up, throw it out! Many pathogenic bacteria generate gas. Also, if the bag smells "off", throw it out. - Some preparations will last much longer. An example is traditional duck confit - this will keep for 6 months or more (regardless whether sous vide, or conventional) because it is highly salted. But "confit" style dish without the salt curing would not work. Note that ALL of these precautions apply to conventional cooking too! Sous vide is NOT more dangerous than conventional cooking. However, sous vide is so convienent to cook and then heat up later that it tempts you to store for longer.

Unfortunately there isn't a very good source for sous vide cooking at the moment. The Joan Roca book is the best that is out there but mainly because it is the only one out there. A proper treatment of food safety, including botulism, is something that is really needed. Most existing food safety or HACCP standards are not suitable for sous vide. As I have said in other posts there is a dearth of good, trustable information. Unfortunately many authorities cannot be trusted fully because the have a tendency to try to simplify the standards - for example telling you to cook to a temperature and ignoring time, or ignoring other important issues like aerobic / anaerobic conditions, pH (acidity) and so forth. These simplifications may be well meaning, and in conventional cooking techniques they may be adequate. I say "may be" because I am very skeptical of trying to artificially simplify a complicated topic. However, even if conventional food safety guidlines are acceptible for conventional cooking techniques, they don't work for sous vide. The technique involves anaerobic conditions, low temperatures and (sometimes) prolonged storage. An eGullet course would be one way to help get this information out, and I would be willing to participate. However, to really do a good job requires more content that would fit in an eGullet course. I have considered writing a book on sous vide, and if I have the time I may do this. There are a couple sous vide books that are coming out, but given the large amount of information required there is probably room for several books.

An excellent analogy! Let me further suggest that we don't need to reprise the full debate on copyright law here in this forum. With respect to food items, copyright protection is only peripherally involved at present. Future extensions of copyright to fashion or food may occur, but we don't need to have a battle about them now because they are entirely hypothetical.

The denominazione d'origine controllata applied to Neapolitan pizza is not a method of protecting a recipe - it is a kind of trademark. In the case of wine this is quite common in Europe - there are names like "Champagne" that you cannot use unless you grow your grapes in a in a particular region. The method of making sparkling wine is not protected - that is in the public domain - but the name "champagne" is covered. As discussed in previous posts, cheese names have a similar scheme - Roquefort can only be made in a certain region by certain producers. In the case of the pizza certification they have rules that you must follow certain standards, use certain ingredients and so forth. As a result the certification is available to people outside a geographic region (there is a "Naples" VPN certified pizzeria here in Seattle, for example). The system is described in articles in Forbes here and from a pizza weblog here . Actually there are two separate, but related efforts. One is an official Italian government law - which would only have legal force in Italy. The other is an international trade association that certifies "authentic" pizza anywhere. Note that BOTH are trademark schemes. One is a private trademark, the other would be in effect a government controlled trademark. This is classic example of trademark protection - use of the NAME is restricted. The process, method and appearance can be used by anybody. However, you can only use the name and claim to be a VPN certified pizzeria if you follow their rules. So, even if the law passes in Italy, nobody will stop you from making a pizza greater than 35 cm in diameter (one of their rules) - but they will stop you from calling it a Neapolitan pizza. The point in protecting a name is to create a brand that the consumer can follow to get a guaranteed quality of experience. It is one of the only forms of intellectual property proteciton available to a traditional technique, because patent protection is only available for a limited time, and you have to file the patent promptly etc. The most common commercial use of this strategy is in chain restaurants - you can't call your hamberger joint "McDonalds" unless you follow their rules, and have an agreement with the company that controls the name. You can't lcall a dish a "Big Mac" if you're not an offical McDonald's franchisee. Although Europe has famous names like Champagne, government controlled trademarks similarare very common in the US for agricultural products. So, there are similar standards on what you can call "ice cream", what is "low fat" and so forth. Here is an official USDA document CFR 21 Part 135 on the official definition of what you can call "ice cream" and other frozen desserts. This kind of trademark or name protection is nothing new at all - these definitions have been around forever for food - both official government controlled names, and privately controlled trademarks. Relais et Chateau is a private trademark scheme for hotels and restaurants - any hotel or restaurant can apply, pay a fee, get your place inspected, and if you pass inspection and so forth then you can put a plaque on the wall that says "Relais et Chateau", and get listed in the book. Trademark protection is available to chefs for their creations. I and others have pointed this out in previous postings in this thread. It is not often used by high end chefs, but it is very common in franchized restaurant world - both for the name of a dish, and for the name of a restaurant. Note that brand new creations are just as suitable for trademark protection as traditional methods. Dippin' Dots is a trademark for example, and the lawsuit that I referenced in earlier posts is in part a trademark dispute.

I am very much in favor of intellectual property protection as a general rule, but it is not clear to me that we need to create anythnig new here. I don't think that chefs need somethnig new or special. Most original and innovative chefs doing high end, low volume cusine probably will not use any formal legal means of intellectual property protection. It is just too expensive, for too little benefit. This is especially true when the dishes cross borders so readily. The case that started this thread were US based chefs being copied in Australia. When a chef invents something novel that has a sufficiently high economic value, then the current means of IP proteciton probably work reasonably well. So, a future Dippin' Dots, or future dish that could be adapted to industrial scale probably should be patented or othewise protected. Copyright, trade secret and patents are very far from perfect, but they work in various scenarios. In addition to formal IP protection, I think that the food community should react as it did in the Chef Bruce / Interlude case and condemn people who copy without attribution. Having the informal culture support innovation is probably more important than the formal legal framework. Toward that end, I think it is inevitable that chefs seeking to establish themselves as innovative will want to publish - on eGullet, other websites, and cookbooks and culinary journals (like Apicus in Spain, or Art Cullinare), or in frequent cookbooks (as with El Bulli). I am not suggesting that anybody be forced to do this - some will and some won't. However, when it comes to somebody taking credit it is very useful to be able to point to a publication of record and say "well, the dish was posted online on X date".

The question of old versus new / original versus classical is somewhat beside the point. Of course some people want excellent execution of classical dishes - that is perfectly valid. Intellectual property laws and conventions simply do not apply to dishes that are in the public domain - either because they are old, or because they were not brought into the intellectual property system (copyright registration, patent filing). The issue is NOT whether all chefs have to be original. It surely doesn't. Look at all of the Italian restaurants that explicitly claim to be "traditional", "original", "authentic" and so forth. Many even make a point of saying that the recipes are from the chef's grandmother. Not that Italian can't be innovative - it can - but there is a clear segment of the market that is explicitly not interested in innovation. The same is true for every "comfort food" dish in any cuisine. The fact is however that since Nouvelle Cuisine in the 1970s through to the present there has been a segment of the food world that is obsessed with originality. You can say it is a good thing (as I do) or a bad thing, but it is hard to deny that it exists. Chefs like Ferran, Heston, Wylie, akwa, Homaro Cantu, Grant Achatz and many others in France (Marc Veyrat, Pierre Gagnaire), Spain (Joan Roca, Santi Santimaria, Dani Garcia, Sergi Arola) and elsewhere have explicitly made their careers rest on a foundation of their originality. Nobody goes to Moto, WD50, Alinea, Fat Duck or El Bulli for excellent execution of classical dishes. If we don't respect their originality(whether through credit and attribution, or through intellectual property), then you thwart their ability to be successful within the segment of the food world that values originality. This isn't a question of whether all food needs to be patented (too late for that!) or that all food needs to be new and original (it doesn't). The question is whether chefs who really are original, and base their careers on it, should be allowed to pursue their vision of cuisine.

At the risk of offending everybody, can I suggest that we all calm down a bit? This debate seems to be lurching between extremes, none of which are reasonable. Will giant companies gobble up the food industry? Well, if you haven't noticed they already have! Industrial food companies like Nabisco, Nestle, Coca Cola, Mars, Hormel and many others are huge. They do dominate certain classes of pre-prepared food. That is nothing new, and nothing to be afraid of. Will patents ruin cuisine? Patents have been filed on food for over a hundred years, so this is nothing new. Patent class code 099 is food and beverage equimpent, patent class code 426 is food or edible material composition. Food patents can also appear in other class codes. Some of the debate seems to revolve around the notion that there is a big change coming. Did patent laws enable Bill Gates and Microsoft to steal other people's ideas? No, actually it is the other way around. Microsoft has paid billions to others in settling patent lawsuits, or licensing patents. The patent system gives small inventors the ability to have some leverage and something of a level playing field with big companies. Is the system perfect? Of course not, but patents are an important way for a small company or lone inventor to have clout with big corporations. Could you patent most techniques in cuisine? No, anything which has been published previously by somebody else is considered "prior art". Expired patents can be used by anybody. There are lots of other rules in addition. Essentially all classical techniques are not available for patent. The Dippin' Dots inventor has a patent on one particular way of making ice cream granules, but when the patent expires everybody will have the right to do it. Chefs (or amateurs) who invent really novel cuisine have the ability to file a patent, but in most cases involving high end cuisine, this will not make sense because the market is too small to justify the cost of the patent. But hey, that is their choice - they can choose to protect it, or choose not to. Big companies have this ability too, and when it comes to pre-packaged food or other large industrial food markets they do patent extensively. I doubt that a big food company are going to hire "the best chefs" and patent small volume, highly labor intensive foods that require ultra fresh ingredients and appeal only to a tiny segment of the populace. In addition to legal protection there is the issue of credit for invention. There is a definite segment of innovative chefs who establish their reputation (and that of their restaurant) by inventing new dishes. While they could patent at least some of their dishes, they tend not to, and basically donate them to the public (especilaly in cases where they disclose the secrets by publishing a recipe). However, it seem to me to be quite understandable that a chef who bases his reputation on being innovative would get pissed off if somebody copies directly without attribution. That is just an appliaciton of the same plagarism/priority system that exists in scientific or academic work.

Having photos and a description posted on eGullet? Why not? ← There are probably two important levels of "publishing" a dish. One is to show the dish and its ingredients to the world - and I think eGullet or other web means are fine. "publishing" in this context means having it appear in a permanent record with a date. Many chefs will have pictures taken of a dish or have it appear in a travel magazine article. The problem with just a picture is that people can then debate the question of how to do it, and can come up with lots of different ways. The more serious verison of publishing a dish is to give the recipe - enough so somebody could make it. That is what a patent is supposed to be - you disclose the secrets in return for getting a temporary exclusive. That is also what scientific and academic publishing is about - you have to show how you got the data and publish the data so that others can reproduce the results. It is the latter approach that Ferran Adria is doing - he publishes photos and the recipes.

My point wasn't to eliminate copyright as an alternative - it probably is one, but I think that it is fair to say that using copyright is not traditional or established in this area. One could make a copyright argument, and if you sought to enforce it you may be making new caselaw. But it is possible. The registration is cheap - but you generally have to do it, and/or mark it. So, the menus would have to say "Culinary creations copyright © 2006 all rights reserved" or something like that. It is unclear that an Australian chef would be legally bound by that appearing on a NY or Chicago menu without additional registration in Australia. The key issue with copyright is that you'd be making a new argument (at least new to me). Likely it would be viewed with suspicion by the plagarist. So, you'd better be prepared to make that argument in court. So while the initial registration is cheap, the fact is that actually getting the proteciton would likely involve a court battle that would not be cheap. This is exactly what happened in the past with copyright protection of software - it wasn't traditional, somebody sought it, then proved it out in case law to the point that it is well established now. Patents on the other hand are expensive up front. But patents on food items are well established for more than 100 years so nobody is going to contest on that grounds. I don't think that point here is legal protection. Legal protection in many forms DOES exist for culinary creations. Exactly which forms apply depends on the case and the situation, and your budget. High end chefs need to think about the mass market appeal of what they do. Shrimp pasta may or may not become the next big thing. But Dippin' Dots (creme anglais squirted into liquid nitrogen) is actually very similar to something that could come from Ferran or Wylie. The situation with Interlude is more of an issue of plargarism and bad ethical behavior. It seems unlikely there is a legal case against him, but he acted badly and should be censured by the community of chefs for this. The guy could easily have created his own dish - inspired by the others. Or even easier yet, he could have given attribution - as was pointed out above that costs nothing.

This is a very interesting thread, which I only just discovered. My business is inventing - I won't waste space on describing it further but here is a recent article from the Boston Globe on my company. I am a big support of inventor's rights - here is an op ed I wrote that ran in the Wall Street Journal last week. I also post to eGullet quite a bit on sous vide and other high tech cooking techinques. Can you patent a dish? Absolutely you can, but most chefs won't want to unless the right situation exists for making it economically sensible. A good example is Dippin' Dots - a patented ice cream novelty product sold in kiosks and dedicated stores. Curt Jones, the inventor, has a patent and has made some money on it (but more on the story below). Many commercial food processes by Kraft, Nabisco, Nestle or other big food companies are patented. If you have an idea that might be commercially viable at that sort of scale, and it is Most high end chefs probably shouldn't patent what the do because the market is too small and too hard to collect. It costs $10K to $20K to get a patent in the US, and then approximately that much again in every other country. Could Wylie patent his shrimp pasta? At this stage probably not because it has been public for so long (in general in the US you can't patent more than a year after the invention is published). But even if he had patented it, and even it was truly novel in the patent sense (which is different than being novel in the restaurant world) he would only have US rights. Would he have spent the extra money to get an Australian patent? It's very hard to argue that. How much shrimp pasta will Australians eat? Michel Bras is generally credited with creating the "molten" center chocolate cake. If he patented it (which would assume that it really was novel enough), and if he got the patent worldwide, and if he convinced every restaurant that makes it to pay him say $0.10 for each serving, then he'd make more money from it than he does from his restaurant. But that is a LOT of ifs strung together. It would have cost him upwards of $100K or more to file in the major markets. Then he would have to convince chefs to pay him - which would be a major undertaking. Practically speaking it wouldn't make sense. Copyright and trademark are also means that one could concievably use to protect a dish. As one example, a number of iconic builidngs in New Yorky have copyright or trademark protection - for example the Chrysler Building, or the New York Public Library. They won't go after tourist snapshots but they will claim rights to any commercial use - for example advertising photos. A food example is Roquefort cheese - you can't call just any blue cheese "roquefort". Within Europe there has long been an "appellation contrlee" or similar concept regarding naming a food product from a place. International law recognizes these trademarks, including the right of non-Europeans to file their food trademarks in Europe (see here). Roquefort is a protected trademark in the US - if you serve a salad dressing in a restaurant that you call "roquefort" on the menu when in fact it is Maytag Blue, then you're in violation and in principle you could be sued. However, to get copyright or trademark protection, one has to register - it is not as expensive as a patent, but again WD50 and Alinea would have had to go through the registration process to claim actual legal protection. Which takes us back to Dippin' Dots. They are currently embroiled in a lawsuit with two competitors on a combination of patent and trademark claims. The interesting thing is that Dippin Dots is claiming trademark protection on the "trade dress" - i.e. the general look and presentation, which is very similar to the case with Interlude. However, there is an interesting twist to the case, which is that the DD competitors claim that some of the features DD asserts are "trade dress" are in fact mentioned in the DD patent as being "functional". So it is an interesting case where patent law and trademark law collide. If you care about these things here is a legal brief that describes it - it is quite readable. Trade secret protection is also available for culinary creations - the most famous example is the secret formula for Coca Cola. This is another topic unto itself so I won't go into it further here. The practical matter is that legal protection for a new dish is available, but it is expensive and rarely makes sense economically. If you want the protection you have to register and file patents, copyright or trademark. In the case of patents, the invention has to truly be novel according to patent office rules on prior art and obviousness. Any chef (or eGullet-er at home) that has an idea that really has commercial potential at large scale should probably consider legal protection. But if you don't file the patent (and pay for it) then you can't later claim rights. That's the legal and business side. There is also the question of moral and ethical outrage. Like it or not novelty and innovation has become a key element in a certain segment of the food world. As a previous post said, WD50 is not only a place you go to refuel when you are hungry, its a center of culinary innovation. Wylie, Heston, Sam Mason, Grant Anchatz and Ferran have staked a large part of their reputations and their professional standing on their originality. Clearly every chef "stands on the shoulders of others" as Wylie was quoted. Actually this is paraphrasing a line by Issac Newton "if I have seen further it is by standing on the shoulders of giants". Of course Newton today is viewed as a giant himself. And although his quote sounds magnanimous, he bitterly contested credit for discoveries with his contemorary rivals, inculding Robert Hooke and Gottfried Leibnitz. There is a somewhat ill defined, but nevertheless real line between learning from others and directly copying a dish and its presentation. Many of the posts try to explore that and ask where the line is. You can quibble about the gray area but Interlude clearly seems to have crossed the line, wherever it is. It seems amazing to me that Chef Robin could be so blatant in his copying without acknowledging that he copied them wholesale. He's made an ass of himself among his peers. What amazes me about this is that this kind of cooking is not easy to do (I've tried!), If he can really execute them well (the photos look like he can) then why couldn't he either acknowledge the origin, or make up his own. Anybody who can execute these surely could come up with some of his own dishes. How could anybody who cares about this kind of food just copy and think that he wouldn't be at the center of a firestorm of criticism? I recently came up with a new technique and told a couple chefs about it. The immediately asked me if they could use it - I said yes, but I was honored to have been asked. Especially since I have learned a lot from them in the past. As another post suggests, El Bulli is at the forefront of the trend in two ways. First because Ferran is so creative he is likely the most influential chef in the world - at least in terms of being copied. The fascinating thing is that in addition to his cusine he has also gotten the jump on the rest of the industry by publishing his recipes annually. In academic circles the way you get credit (and thus a kind of ownership) is by publishing first. Tenure in a university, or the Nobel Prize hangs in the balance so academics have an urgency publish new results to avoid being scooped by a competitor. Academics like to say to say that they freely share ideas, but that sharing only takes place AFTER they have been published and credit for publishing has been established. The race to publish helps settle disputes on who came first, and gives everybody incentive. Chefs typically haven't done this. Periodically they will publish cookbooks or recipes but the idea of rushing out in print just hasn't been at the forefront. Ferran Adria has taken the lead here in committing to publish a new book every year at the end of the season. Adria also dates his recipes - so there is Omlete Suprise 2003, for example, reinforcing the idea that the dish is from the 2003 season - very much like the concept of a "model year" for cars. I have talked to several chefs that have some heartburn about this - they feel that it puts a lot of pressure on them to do the same, and perhaps to disclose things that they'd rather not disclose. Unfortunately you can't have it both ways. If you want to be known for being first with new ideas, then it will be hard to resist a push to publish in this fashion, and also to give credit to others, with an ethical system on plargarism similar to what you find in academics or journalism.

Thanks for the kind words Today I visited Cusine Solutions in Virginia, the largest sous vide food processor in the country. They operate in five countries, and produce literally millions of pounds of sous vide food per year. Their primary business is pre-cooked frozen sous vide entrees for banquets, airlines and other contexts. Their products are distributed at retail through Costco - I'll look for them next time I'm there. It is a very impressive operation. They have water baths that hold 2 tons of water in a single bath - and they have a LOT of them. Interestingly enough, the technique is almost identical to the small volume sous vide - just organized at a different scale.