For more than a decade Ferran Adriá has allowed us to take part in the creative process through the magnificent El Bulli books. And now - finally - we will have the opportunity to look behind the curtains in another top restaurant where molecular gastronomy is practiced. The book Alinea, named after the Chicago restaurant headed by chef Grant Achatz, is due to appear in October this year. According to the publisher, this is what to expect:

A pioneer in American cuisine, chef Grant Achatz represents the best of the molecular gastronomy movement - brilliant fundamentals and exquisite taste paired with a groundbreaking approach to new techniques and equipment. ALINEA showcases Achatz’s cuisine with more than 100 dishes (totaling 600 recipes) and 600 photographs presented in a deluxe volume. Three feature pieces frame the book: Michael Ruhlman considers Alinea’s role in the global dining scene, Jeffrey Steingarten offers his distinctive take on dining at the restaurant, and Mark McClusky explores the role of technology in the Alinea kitchen. Buyers of the book will receive access to a website featuring video demonstrations, interviews, and an online forum that allows readers to interact with Achatz and his team.

More links:
Alinea book homepage

I just wanted to let you know that the Khymos marketplace is operative. You can now shop books, hydrocolloids, thermometers, scales, whippers, syringes, tubes, squeeze bottles, knives and more directly from this site. I’ve selected products that should be of particular interest for amateur cooks and professional chefs that are intersted in molecular gastronomy, molecular cooking and popular food science. The marketplace is powered by Amazon.com.

This piece of art was recently sold at an auction for $ 35 million USD! No … just kidding. Read on to find out more!

For the 10th round of TGRWT I decided to modify one of my favorite pizza recipes. As it already has some blue cheese I decided that I would just add som pineapple to the sauce and see how that would work out. Knowing that pineapple works quite well on pizza (at least I have childhood memories from a pizza place called “Aloha” where they served a “Hawaiian delight” pizza with pineapple, ham and cheese) I was quite optimistic about this combination.

Normally I don’t use a recipe for the dough. I only remember to use 1 dL water per person. Everything else is added ad lib. But to give you a proper recipe I measured all the ingredients. Using 4 dL water gives approximately 1 kg dough in total. This gives 3 pizzas with a diameter of about 26 cm, serving 3-4 people. If you like you can roll the dough out thinner and make 4 pizzas and stretch the sauce and toppings correspondingly.

Pizza dough
4 dL water
5 g salt
5 g fresh yeast
580 g flour (plain white)
20 g olive oil

Add salt and yeast to luke warm water (~37 °C) and stir to dissolve yeast. Add flour in portions, reserving about 40 g. Mix/knead well for a couple of minutes. The dough is quite sticky. Add the olive oil. Mix/knead more. Add the remaining flour and fold the dough a couple of times. Cover and let rise for 1-2 hours.

Addition of 2% oil helps to give a lighter texture. But mix/knead the dough first so you form the gluten network before you add the oil. Otherwise the oil will cover the glutenin and gliadin proteins and inhibit the formation of gluten, rendering the dough less elastic.

Pizza sauce
45 g sardines (I used King Oscar “Mediterranean style”)
3 t capers
2 T tomatoe paste
1 clove garlic
4 pineapple rings

Mix everything in a small food processor. (You can also add some olives if you like.)

Blue cheese sauce
75 g blue cheese
75 g crème fraîche

Crumble the blue cheese, add the crème fraîche and mix until smooth.

Toppings
1-2 onions, in rings
50 g pepperoni
100 g cheddar, grated

Assemble the pizza as follows. Roll out approximately 330 g dough and place it on a suitable pizza peel (if you forget this you won’t be able to transfer the pizza to the baking stone). Add pizza sauce, blue cheese sauce, onion rings, pepperoni and cheddar cheese. Transfer to a preheated pizza stone and bake at 250-300 °C until nicely browned. Depending on temperature this typically takes around 5-10 min.

The key to a good pizza is turning up the heat! I usually set my oven around 250 °C, but you can go even higher if you like. Secondly you want to use a pizza stone (also known as a baking stone) to get that nice oven spring and a crisp crust. The picture at the top of this blog post is just a close up of my pizza stone! The black speckles are the carbonized remains of cheese and pizza sauce. I’ve blogged about the science of pizza stones previously:

A baking stone is made from a porous ceramic material. It’s heat capacity is good (much higher than that of a metal plate/sheet) and as a result, when the cold dough is placed on the baking stone, it still has enough heat to make the pizza rise immediately. Secondly, the fact that the baking stone is porous lets it absorb moisture from the pizza. This is what gives the nice crisp crust as it transports moisture away from the pizza.

Verdict:
The original version of this pizza (without pineapple) is one of my absolute favorites and tinkering a little with the recipe doesn’t change this. But even so I felt that the pineapple diluted the pizza sauce and that the sweetness took away too much of the saltiness of the pizza sauce. Unfortunately, when making the pizza sauce, I discovered that my tube of tomato paste was empty so I used ketchup in stead. In retrospect I see that this wasn’t a good choice as ketchup is quite sweet. Therefore it’s not fair to say that all the extra sweetness came from the pineapple, but it nevertheless contributed with a lot of sweetness.

The overall flavor was very nice though, and my wife thought this pizza was better. Personally however I prefer the “original”. But perhaps next time I’ll try to add pineapple chunks in stead of churning it together with the sauce so as to concentrate the pineapple flavour more and allow it to come in small “flavor packs” now and then. I think that might work better.

Serve with red wine and a fresh salad!

Back from a trip abroad I can finally relay the announcement of the 10th round of “They go really well together”. The round is hosted by David Barzelay at Eat Foo(d) and the challenge this time is to combine pineapple and blue cheese.

In the list Heston Blumenthal posted on eGullet a long time ago it was pointed out that for this combination a certain level of ketones (molecules with a special carbon oxygen bond) for the combination to work. Since there was no further information I did some further research - and voilà - lists of odorants for pineapple and gorgonzola cheese have been published! But surprisingly there was no overlap between the compounds for which odor activity values (OAV) had been calculated. A possible reason is that only 12 and 15 compounds for pineapple and gorgonzola respectively where quantified so that OAV’s could be calculated (notice that it is the quantification which is really time consuming when doing this kind of research). Another point is that different experimental techniques where used in quantifying the volatiles. But regarding the ketones the gorgonzola article at least shows that “natural” (dry, crumbly) gorgonzola has higher levels of ketones than “creamy” gorgonzola.

To conclude, there is a possibility that the overlap in impact odorants for pineapple and blue cheese has not been uncovered yet, or that this combination can not be explained by overlapping impact odorants (and I should quickly add that this is of course the case for most flavor pairings we encounter in the kitchen!).

Recently I received an email from Thorsten Spickenreuther, a German PhD student, who inspired by my post on vauquelins asked me whether I had made any cocktail flavored vauquelins yet. I gave him the details of what I had tried and encouraged him to experiment a little. Here’s a report which he sent me (and allowed me to share with you):

Cocktail Vauqueline – First Experiment

I started off with just one egg white and slowly added up to 100ml of almond syrup (i.e. water & sugar) and about 50ml of lime juice (i.e. acid) because the end result should be a Mai Tai flavoured Vauqueline. As it was already 2 am, my motivation for using a whisk was rather low, so my electric mixer had to do the job. Moreover, i didn’t have a metal bowl at hand, so the increase in volume was not as big as may have been expected – the result was about 1.5 liters of firm, stiff egg white foam.

As my silicon moulds survive my microwave without problems, i thought ,,Why not using them here to get a nice pyramid shape for the planned Mai Tai flavoured dessert?” No sooner said than done, and after 8 seconds at 440W, the result looked quite nice. The volume increased a little and the foam maintained its shape very well. The pyramids came out of the moulds easily and even could be cut by pressing a spatula to the blade of a knife, cut and then separate (a two blade knife? …slightly reminds me of a Dire Straits song…). Using smaller moulds (hemispheres) was no problem, too.

Okay, now we have a nice foam with an abundantly sweet’n’sour and almondy taste. But this is not Mai Tai yet and Trader Vic would turn in his grave. So we need at least some rum and a dash of orange curac¸ao. Adding the liquor (40-50ml), the foam broke down a little, but regained its firmness after a while of whisking and the final result was like before. I even did a quick-and-dirty dessert-decoration by adding caramelized kiwi slices and a bit of thickened passion fruit sauce.

Oh… yes…… most important: The taste was excellent. You have to be a bit careful with the quantity of the syrup so the ,,drink” doesn’t get too sweet, but the Cocktail Vauqueline experiment sure was a success. You also have to be careful with the liquor – a further increase left me with a flowing mass and i wasn’t able to get a firm foam again, even after a long time of whisking (this may also be due to the long time of standing, the plastic bowl and the electric mixer with rather thick wires). For the future, i’m going to try some other cocktail flavours and how using fatty components like cream of coconut affects the stability of the foam in the end. I think the cocktail combination is suited best for creamy and juicy cocktails (i.e. ,,fancies”) but i will try something like Cuba Libre and Gin Fizz, too (although i think the ,,jelly-approach” is better for this type of cocktails). An interesting experiment would also be to use an iSi Whip with N₂O charging to speed up the creation process.

If you want to contact Thorsten directly he can be reached by email on sylance [at] web [dot] de.

Hervé This was touring California in February to promote his latest book. He flew in to San Francisco late at night and found most restaurants closed, so he and his wife dined at a randomly chosen Chinese restaurant. Hervé:

“Everything was in Chinese, there was no English. Don’t ask me what we ate because I have no idea, but I was there with my wife, fully in love, and so it was the best meal of my life.”

So true!

I’m tempted to say that this is Hervé in a nutshell. According to him a meal has three components - love, art and a technical component. Molecular gastronomy should investigate all three of them. More about how Hervé This defines and looks upon molecular gastronomy can be found here.

[quote via Times-Herald]