Oakland Food Scene Gets Much Deserved Ink (That doesn’t include Temescal)
Love this piece in the times. Urban Homesteading in Oakland. Oak-town baby!
(Cross-posted at The Contrarian.)
A recent piece in the UK’s Times Online hipped me to some developments in my world that might be interesting in yours. Two scions in the genre of fine dining have teamed up for a foray into truly synthetic foods. Now, this chow may not be “made of people” like Soylent Green, but it still smacks of kind-of-disgusting if you ask me. The shame of it all is that both Herve This and Pierre Gagnaire were heroes of sorts to me. Particularly Gagnaire.
A bit in the way of backstory: Herve is a food scientist; that is a scientist focused on food. His work is credited as the foundation of today’s techniques known as Molecular Gastronomy, in the parlance of our times. He has mentored — directly or indirectly — each and every star in the MG constellation: Wylie Dufresne, Heston Blumenthal and Grant Achatz to name but a few. And, of course, Ferran Adria.
Now, I am not here to doubt or refute the value of their collective contribution to the world of cooking and eating — for it is not only immense, but also fantastic. (Take a moment to explore the links of those chefs I just mentioned. . . there is some very far out stuff there.) Gagnaire is a chef of extremely high regard, and his Paris temple of gastronomy, Restaurant Pierre Gagnaire, has won hosts of awards over the years, including the coveted 3 Michelin Stars. His work is breathtaking, refined, elegant, etc. Also, it is very, very French.
Of the many tenets associated with MG, one of the foremost is that foodstuffs be mentally reduced to their elemental building blocks and reconsidered. What makes eggs do what they do, and how can we add to or diminish those properties? Do carrots need to be roasted in order to taste or appear roasted? Can we “poach” a chicken in an oven? What does it mean to coagulate vs. congeal, and how can we take the distinction to a logical conclusion about how best to prepare a given dish? As part of this process, most MG cooks use a host of additives and chemicals (not to mention highly specialized pieces of equipment) in the cooking process to achieve particular results — Fried Mayonnaise, Spherical Olives and the like. Yeah, these guys have a language all their own.
Gagnaire and This have been working together for some years, and they’ve now developed a series of dishes, called La note a note, derived in part or in whole, from purely synthetic sources. That is to say, rather then cooking carrots under pressure for a given time and then pureeing and/or reducing to concentrate the beta carotenes, they’re simply starting with the synthetic carotenes and “building” food from scratch. Certainly interesting from an analytical stance, but is it delicious?
Can food be considered merely the sum of its parts, or is there some nuanced — dare I say mystical — superiority to the wholesome foods “intended” by nature? Regardless of the preparation, I do believe that there is inherent value to beginning with actual food, rather than lab made synthetics.
From the Times Online:
[This] says compound cooking will enthral our taste buds — or, rather, our trigeminal nerve — and help to end food shortages and rural poverty because farmers could increase profitability by “fractioning their vegetables”.
Pretty lofty goals indeed, but fractioned vegetables? Really? Here’s the recipe for one such “foodstuff,” called Polyphenol Sauce:
Melt 100g of glucose and 20g of tartaric acid in 20cl of water. Add 2g of polyphenol. Boil and add sodium chloride and piperine. Bind the sauce with amylose. Take off the heat and stir in 50g of triacylglycerol.
C’mon then. . . is this even food? Granted, what they’re talking about is sugar, salt and a host of binding and flavoring agents. Cooking through chemistry is at least on some level familiar to the junk-food-addled minds of most Americans (Twinkies, man. . . Twinkies), but it’s possible these foreign chefs have stepped over a line with their fully synthesized food. Blinded by a purely scientific approach, they missed (deliberately, I imagine) the crucial conciet that food is more than its base building blocks. Or is it?
I wish Rudolph Steiner were here to comment on this, as his Demeter system for biodynamic farming — which regards the whole farm as a living organism with a multiplicity of parts associated in myriad ways with the whole — is about as esoteric a tradition as can be found. In that system, there can be no base building blocks, no elemental compounds from which to build food. The whole is required to make the individual. . . they are inseparable.
Although I have long been fascinated with MG and laboratory techniques in the kitchen, I am not encouraged in the slightest by the notion that food, or the process of growing food, will lose completely it’s metaphysical attachment to the Earth, the Sun, and the seasons.
This is so awesome. From today’s NY Times comes this piece about making yogurt at home. It’s simple, easy, and satisfying.
Even if cultured dairy products aren’t part of your daily regimen, they’re worth making once in a while just to know how good they can be, and to experience the everyday miracle of fermentation.
Fermentation is indeed a miracle. A wonderfully delicious and fantastic one. Without it we’d have no kim chee, no beer, no yogurt – a life not worth living if you ask me. As simple as that.
Thanks Harold…You Rock.
If you don’t already own On Food & Cooking, by all means, go buy it now. Yay!
By now you’ve all seen the wonderfully cynical and disgusting food-porn site ThisIsWhyYou’reFat and have shared some of your favorites with close friends and loved ones, but a little digging turned up a not so ironic list of similarly foul sounding junk food. The state of Texas is known for many things – villainous ex-presidents, SXSW, etc. – and its culinary traditions are vibrant, strong, and often fried.
The Bigtex State Fair has a remarkable list of painfully fried foodstuffs in its annual contest. Here\’s my favorite of the finalists…
Yup. That's chicken fried bacon alright.
Only 174 days left until the grand fiesta. Start exercising now so you’ll be fit as a fiddle for all the fine fixins’.
Maybe it was the kooky hippie foodies or maybe they were going to do it all along. Either way, the Obama’s have dug in for the garden!
From the New York Times:
While the organic garden will provide food for the first family’s meals and formal dinners, its most important role, Mrs. Obama said, will be to educate children about healthful, locally grown fruit and vegetables at time when obesity has become a national concern.
Finally something good in the news. The First Lady goes on to say:
My hope is that through children, they will begin to educate their families and that will, in turn, begin to educate our communities. You can begin in your own cupboard by eliminating processed food, trying to cook a meal a little more often, trying to incorporate more fruits and vegetables…
I can hear the Monsanto and ADM lawyers kicking their Aston Martins into high gear as they prepare to lobby for an apology to theFood Processing industry. Great move Michelle! Now tell Barry to fire Geithner, sue AIG, draw down in Iraq and build the damn smart power grid already.
Here’s the plan so far…
They must love spinach...
Maybe the last one on the West Coast?
BevMo, $4.89 for the 22oz.
Make your own word clouds at Wordle. You can add custom text or a url for your favorite site.
Still relatively unconfirmed at the moment, but it looks to be the end of the series of Frank Zappa inspired brews from Lagunitas. Brewed For Thought has the goods here.
Sayonara!
In a continuing effort to stay relevant, the Christian movement has seized upon Kosher salt as their latest bogeyman and developed this new and improved sea salt. New and improved you say?
It might not have the power of levitation or the ability to kill a yak with mind-control, but yeah, it has been blessed. By whom I am not too sure.
I hesitate to support them but what the hell…you can get it all right here. Tell em the Rebbe sent you.
This is not looking good…NY Times piece on school lunches here.
I say scrap the hot lunches and give everybody a cheese sandwich!
