Bookshelf: Modernist Cuisine

I’ve cast, on occasion, disparaging remarks about modern food and drink. Meant every word, too. As a drinks judge, I’ve been served badly executed drinks by aspiring molecular cocktologists hellbent on deploying foams and smoke in places they did not belong (once, horribly, with Diet Dr Pepper and black tapioca pearls). Cooks are not immune to the desire to foist upon us novel creations. A few months back, the San Diego Tribune asked me to suggest places with great modern desserts. “I’ve had it with modern desserts,” I responded.

Few things depress me more than the freakish curiosities of pastry chefs who’ve abandoned familiar forms in a misguided rush for the sublime. Deconstructed this and re-imagined that...Just make a cake and make it delicious. I don’t need to crack open an egg shell (“Oh, look! It’s really the frosting, frozen with liquid nitrogen! And ambergris angel food cake with a colloidal Meyer-lemon center!”) to get genuine, unalloyed pleasure. Keep your modern desserts. I’ve got ice cream and brownies. 

Yet as hamfisted as some of the executions are, modernist cuisine — what some have dubbed molecular gastronomy — is creeping into wider acceptance, understanding, and successful use. Even by home cooks. And so I’ve been boning up on modernist cooking. Like it or not, the approach will grow more widespread in upcoming years as ingredients and techniques once thought exotic or uber-geeky become commonplace. It behooves us to understand what we're facing when we're presented with such things.

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Different cooks have different takes on what modernist cooking is, but if there were one common thread, it is an earnest questioning of received kitchen knowledge and a desire to discover through experimental inquiry how best (defined variously) to prepare certain dishes.

Quite famously, for instance, in On Food and Cooking, science writer Harold McGee debunked the widely held notion that searing a steak “sealed in” its juices, making it juicier and more succulent than without the customary brown crust. As adamantly as even some professional chefs insist on this practice, it has no basis in truth. In fact, searing steak demonstrably causes it to lose moisture. That sizzle you hear when a steak is slapped on the grill? Those are juices vaporizing. If the surface were sealed, you wouldn’t hear that sound. Any steak eater can attest, however, that a degree of sear on a steak is good — not for any juice-sealing, but because of a browning process that helps makes food from cookies to dry-aged rib-eyes taste delicious. The process is called the Maillard reaction. Merely knowing that will earn you a degree of respect among cooks who dig this sort of thing.

The go-to book of the moment — and undoubtedly for decades to come — is Nathan Myhrvold’s six-volume Modernist Cuisine. Sure, you could (and should) read Harold McGee’s books if you want to get a grip on why modern cookery at times seems to have become unmoored from its classical foundations. You should also read those edited or written by and about Hervé This, Ferran Adrià, Nicholas Kurti, Heston Blumenthal, and others at the fore of what Jeffrey Steingarten has dubbed “hypermodern” cooking. Modernist Cuisine, though, is where the vacuum-packed, sous-vide meat of the matter lies.

Order up: The Mushroom Swiss Burger

At a breath-taking $625, this isn’t a purchase for the casual cook. The recipes can seem daunting with their calls for esoteric equipment and occasionally obscure ingredients. I’ve been working my way through it on and off for the last month. Quite simply, I cannot afford many of the kitchen tools, toys, and ingredients described in its pages. But that doesn’t stop me from wanting a hamburger as prepared following Myhrvold’s method: wrapped (a la Laura Palmer) in plastic, warmed in circulating water for about thirty minutes to 56°C/133°F, frozen in liquid nitrogen for 30 seconds, then deep-fried in 232°C/450°F oil for one minute to brown the crust. In volume five, Myhrvold gives the recipe for a mushroom Swiss cheese burger. Despite the 30-hour preparation, I want, as Liz Lemon says, to go to there.

Like the very best manuals, Modernist Cuisine is one to revisit time and time again. The photography is a joy and the writing is easy to understand even if the concepts are not at first intuitive. I didn’t absorb it all on the first reading, nor will I on the second. But having plowed through it feels a bit like I’ve survived a postgraduate seminar on anatomy and organic chemistry — and I’m hungry for more.

Just keep those foaming, smoking, glow-in-the-dark, hot-gel cocktails at arm’s length.

Nathan Myhrvold et al (2011)
Modernist Cuisine: The Art and Science of Cooking 
2438 pages (hardback)
The Cooking Lab
ISBN: 0982761007
$625.00

Goes well with:

• A more approachable (and affordable) manual comes from British bacon-curer Maynard Davies. Manual of a Traditional Bacon Curer  may be smaller and cheaper than Modernist Cuisine, but it too is very good indeed.
• Speaking of cocktologists, don't forget this guy when you're deciding what to drink.

Feasting on Bones

Once every two months or so, I make a huge pot of beef stock, some to be used within a few days, some for freezing. If I’m ambitious, some gets cooked down even further with additional ingredients into a tiny amount of thick demi-glace. There’s sautéing of vegetables and roasting of bones involved. It’s kind of a pain. It’s not that it’s hard; it’s not at all. It’s just mindless work. Doing it correctly means we eat well.


So I bribe myself to get it done by sliding into the oven — while the bones for stock roast — an extra pan of sawed-off little leg bones. As the stock simmers, I end up with a few spoons of delicious roasted beef marrow: something to snack on, the sort of treat for cooks that never makes it past the kitchen door.

If you’re not into marrow, or offal, or “variety meats,” “the fifth quarter,” or whatever you care to call suspicious animal bits, I can understand skipping this little lagniappe. But you’d be missing out.

By the time I take the pan of sizzling marrowbones from the hot oven, I’ve drizzled a bit of olive oil on rough chunks of bread and lightly toasted them. With the end of a long wooden spoon, I’ll nudge plugs of softened, hot marrow from each bone and press them, crushing them just the slightest bit to make them stay in place, onto the toasted bread. A quick grind of coarse grey sea salt between my thumb and the side of my forefinger over the whole thing and it’s ready.

I'll spare you the infantile onomatopoeia of a degrading "nom nom nom," but forgive me if I wish you...bone appetit.

Homemade Corned Beef

For some unknown reason corned beef does not receive the careful display it should get. Too many meat men merely toss the corned beef into a platter any old way. It should be remembered that corned beef is a big trade puller for people who will go miles out of their way to patronize a meat market that is known for good corned beef.

~ Albert Todoroff (1949)

Store Tested Ideas for Meat Men

Inspired by (a) St. Patrick's Day (b) Darina Allen's book and (c) the repugnant pink sludge enrobing vacuum-packed corned beef that started showing up on store shelves several weeks ago, I made corned beef this week. That's not to say that I merely cooked a piece of it — I sourced a fresh beef brisket, washed it, trimmed it, slipped it in cold spiced brine and let that mother sit in there for almost a week. The result was a rosy pink hunk of beef that was the centerpiece of a simple dinner last night: corned beef brisket, boiled fingerling potatoes, and — since I don't care for plain boiled cabbage — coleslaw. On the side: a pot of homemade mustard made with Filipino vinegar.

Simple, tasty, the precursor to both sandwiches and homemade beef hash. The following recipes may seem like a lot of work; they're not. They are super simple, just heavy on the words to describe it for anyone who's never tried making corned beef before.

Corned Beef

Beef brisket — about a 5-pound piece
1 gallon cold spiced brine (see below)
Pickling spices*

Wash and pat dry the brisket. Gently place it in a pot large enough to accommodate the piece in one hunk. Carefully pour the chilled brine over it to cover. Weigh it down, if necessary, with a ceramic plate or bowl. Alternately, carefully slip the brisket into the brine if it's already in an appropriate container. Refrigerate for five days, checking now and then to make sure it remains submerged. After 2 or 3 days, turn the beef over (overhaul it) and continue brining.

After five days, remove the (now shrunken and somewhat darkened) beef from the brine, rinse it, and place in a large pot or dutch oven with fresh water to cover. Add a small handful (say, somewhere between an eighth and a quarter of a cup) of pickling spices, bring to a boil, then reduce to a simmer. Cover and simmer 3-4 hours until done.

Remove from the liquid and rest 15-20 minutes before slicing. Alternately, allow to cool completely before slicing for sandwiches or cutting thicker bits for hash.

Spiced Brine

1 gallon/4 liters water
2 c/450g kosher salt
.25 c/50g white table sugar
.25 c/50g brown sugar
1oz/25g pink curing salt (aka Prague Powder No.1)
Half a head (about 6-8 cloves) of garlic, peeled and minced
1 oz/25g pickling spices*

Bring all the ingredients to a boil, stirring until the salts and sugars are dissolved. Turn the heat off, let it cool, then refrigerate before using — you don't to start cooking the beef in a hot brine.

*Pickling spices are available at numerous grocers, spice shops, and ethnic markets. The dry mixture generally contains mustard seeds, black peppercorns, bay leaves, cinnamon, and hot pepper. The version below is cobbled together from several sources, including Micheal Ruhlman and Brian Poleyn's Charcuterie, Linda Ziedrich's The Joy of Pickling, and Quick Pickles, a collaboration between Chris Schlesinger, John Willoughby, and Dan George.

By volume (cups, tablespoons, sour cream containers, whatever constant comforts you), mix the following:

2 parts each — cracked black peppercorns, yellow mustard seeds, black/brown mustard seeds, coriander seeds, cracked allspice berries, Aleppo pepper (preferred) or crushed red chili, and cloves.

1 part each — ground ginger and ground mace

For every cup of the above mix, add a small handful of crumbled dry bay leaves (not fresh ones) and 2 or 3 4" sticks of Mexican canela, roughly crushed into large pieces. If you prefer to use the firmer, darker cinnamon sticks, use only 2. What you don't use for the brine and cooking the beef, you can use later for homemade cucumber pickles.

Santa Maria Tri-tip

Donner? Party of 12?

Your table is ready.

As the Smiths song has it, meat is murder. According to a recent verdict in a British court case from Yorkshire, it is apparently delicious, cannibalistic murder. It seems that a former Mr. Gay UK had been convicted on charges of murder, and of cooking and eating at least a portion of another man. One can't be too careful about those offers to come for dinner.

I do my part to keep human flesh consumption to a minimum. Even so, we don’t eat as much meat as I did growing up in Kansas City—where any meal without a bit of flesh seemed like we got stiffed—but we are far from vegan.

Since moving to California, one of the area’s dishes I’ve come to appreciate is Santa Maria barbecue. This variety from the central coast between Los Angeles and San Francisco uses tri-tip, a vaguely triangular piece of beef cut of beef that is infrequently found in the US beyond the state's borders. Cooked Santa Maria style, tri-tip is bathed in a marinade of salt, pepper, garlic, and occasionally other spices, and then slowly grilled over red oak.

Now, because it’s grilled and not smoked slowly for hours, it’s not barbecue as we understand it when we eat in places such as Kansas City, Memphis, Texas, or nearly anywhere in the Carolinas. California is far enough away from those other places, though, that those living there shouldn’t get their backs up about it.

The seasoning I use when grilling tri-tips is your standard Santa Maria spice mixture, except that because lemon trees are so common here, I include dried, powdered lemon peel that I make myself once a year when concocting my annual batch of fish house punch (that calls for a quart of fresh, strained lemon juice).

If you don’t have tri-tip, you’re not out of luck. It turns out that the seasoning works very well with flank steaks, tenderloins, and other beef cuts as well as pork cuts you would normally grill.

As for manflesh? I shall leave that and its preparation to your discretion. As with moonshine and home-distilled liquor, it is prudent to obey local laws.

Santa Maria Tri-tip

For this, I used a mild canola oil because an assertive olive oil taste would throw off the flavors of some great beef, but do as you will. The beef itself should not come very fatty, but trim off any huge hunks of fat, leaving enough to help the marinade along as it slowly cooks over the coals.

1 small handful of garlic, peeled
½ cup canola oil
2 Tbl coarse sea salt
1 Tbl whole black peppercorns
2 tsp powdered dry lemon peel
3.5 lbs tri-tip, trimmed of outrageously excess fat

Put the ingredients (except the beef) in a food processor or blender and blend until the mixture is emulsified and fairly smooth. It is not necessary to make a completely smooth and homogenous mixture. Smear the mixture all over the tri-tip. Place the meat in a zip lock bag or a nonreactive bowl and let marinate in the refrigerator for several hours or overnight.

About an hour before grilling, let the meat come to room temperature.

Sear the fatty side over direct heat, then the other side, about 3-4 minutes per side.

Cook over indirect heat about 20-25 minutes (it’s to an internal temperature of 120-25 Fahrenheit). Let the tri-tip rest 10 minutes and slice thinly against the grain.

Note that the traditional accompaniment to this is a small dish of the small ruddy pinquito beans one finds up the coast. I'm lucky since I can get them at our local farmers market. But they can be tricky to find outside California. As you can see in the photograph here, sometimes I just throw some vegetables on the grill for the last several minutes of cooking.

Goes well with:

• Rancho Gordo's pinquito beans. Check out their website and if you like the look of these little buggers, order a few pounds. They also sell Christmas lima beans, vaqueros, borlottis, red nightfalls, and other tricky-to-find beans.
• Peter Greenaway's 1990 film, The Cook The Thief His Wife & Her Lover in which Michael Gambon's despicable Albert Spica gets a mouthful.
• Ravenous (1999) starring Guy Pearce, Robert Carlyle, and the inestimable Jeffery Jones. A tale of meat in California.