Even chefs far from the avant-garde use hydrocolloids. David Kinch, the chef of Manresa Restaurant in Los Gatos, Calif., known for ultra-fresh and ultra-local ingredients, makes purees of vegetables. To keep water from leaking out, he adds a touch of xanthan gum.
One of the dishes Mr. Dufresne presented in his Starchefs talk was what he called “knot foie,” a result of experimentation combining xanthan gum with konjac flour, made from a tuber long used in Japanese cooking.
“We’ve had konjac flour in the kitchen for a long time, and we just hadn’t used it,” Mr. Dufresne said. “We realized, after reading, that it has a really interesting synergy with xanthan gum. It makes a kind of funky, strange gel on its own, but in conjunction with xanthan gum, which on its own won’t make a gel but is just a thickener, it makes a really interesting, very elastic product.”
He continued: “So we thought, well what could we take that normally wouldn’t behave like that but would be really interesting. And almost instantly, we came up with the idea of foie gras.”
One wall of the WD-50 kitchen, with metal shelves filled with white bottles of hydrocolloids, looks almost like a pharmacy. Mr. Dufresne’s reading material includes “Water-Soluble Polymer Applications in Foods” and “Hydrocolloid Applications: Gum Technology in the Food and Other Industries.”
Like scientists, Mr. Dufresne and his staff experiment, recording their observations and findings in notebooks. Using butter — much cheaper than foie gras — they began a series of trials in May to determine the ideal proportion of konjac to xanthan, which turned out to be 70 percent konjac, 30 percent xanthan in a 0.65 percent concentration.
“It’s a recipe,” Mr. Dufresne said.
In addition to flexible butter, Mr. Dufresne also has a recipe for a butter that does not melt in an oven. (That innovation has yet to find a place on his menu.) The latest experiments are how to make deep-fried hollandaise sauce, which he hopes to wrap into a variation of eggs benedict.
To make a flexible foie, a foie gras terrine is melted into liquefied fat, the xanthan and konjac are mixed in, and then a small amount of water and an egg yolk, which helps keep everything evenly suspended in the liquid, are blended in. The mixture is spread on a sheet, chilled, cut into strands and tied into knots. Hence, knot foie.
In the question-and-answer session, one person asked why Mr. Dufresne went to the trouble of making a foie gras terrine, a process that takes half a day of chilling, when the next step was melting it into a liquid.
“We were trying to be true and honest to that aspect of French cooking,” Mr. Dufresne replied. He paused before adding, “And do something kind of crazy with it.”
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