Fizzy Fruit

Hello again! After a relaxing week off, I am back with more food than before! I am well into designing the menu for my dinners that will be the final product of my presentation, and will be continuing to perfect those recipes as time goes on. But for now, I have a very fun and simple experiment that most people can do at home!

Ever had sparkling cider? Or perhaps a different fruit flavored soda? We like the sweetness of the fruit combined with the carbonation of the liquid. What if we could do that...but inside the fruit?

Carbonation is the process of putting Carbon Dioxide bubbles into a liquid under pressure. When the pressure is released, the Carbon Dioxide leaves the liquid over time in the form of small bubbles, which we perceive as fizziness. That's why we can have drinks like sodas stay carbonated for long periods of time when they're unopened; they're still under pressure.

But back to the fruit. It's pretty obvious that most kinds of fruit are full of juice. We often drink it from a concentrated form with breakfast. But how could we carbonate the juice inside of an orange? The pretty simple answer involves using a form of Carbon Dioxide that most people are familiar with: dry ice.

Dry ice is a relatively easily obtained ingredient and is available at many regular grocery stores if you just ask the cashier when you check out. At only a few dollars a pound, it is also very reasonably priced. But how does one go about actually carbonating fruit with a chunk of dry ice?

Here's a step by step process that I've come up with:

1. Cut whatever fruit you wish to carbonate into pieces so that the flesh is exposed. The gas can only penetrate the skin of some fruits. The peel and pith of an orange is too think for example. Grapes do not need any preparation. Experiment with different types of fruit!

2. Get a small ice chest and put a block of dry ice in the bottom (you really don't need more than a pound or two). Fill the ice chest with water so that the dry ice is about covered to ensure that it sublimates correctly. IMPORTANT If you don't put enough water in the bottom, the "fog" that is characteristic of dry ice will not be produced, and the fruit will not carbonate.

3. Put the tray of fruit into the ice chest so that it is above the water level. (Use a bowl turned upside down or something that will make sure that the fruit doesn't fall in the water. Nobody likes soggy fruit. Ew.)

4. With the water and the fruit in the ice chest, close the lid but do not latch the ice chest closed.

5. For an hour check the chest periodically and make sure the lid is closed, if it pops open, just close it again. This is just a way of allowing excess pressure to vent.

6. An hour later, pull out your fruit and enjoy some very exotic fizziness to your fruit immediately!

What happens in the ice chest during that hour is that as the dry ice sublimates (turns from a solid into a gas) the pressure inside builds, forcing carbon dioxide into the fruit. Think of this like an unopened soda can. When you take the fruit out of the ice chest, it's like opening the can of soda. The difference in pressure means that the Carbon Dioxide bubbles in the fruit are being pulled out by the pressure differential. For this reason, eating the fruit right after you take it out of the ice chest is the best way to ensure maximum carbonation. Just like any fizzy drink, the fruit will go flat after a few minutes of sitting out.

This is a very easy and fun thing to do! Give it a try and let me know in the comments how it goes! Don't hesitate with any questions!

Open Flames and Alcohol...What Could Go Wrong?

Yesterday, I decided to try making bananas foster. For those who don't know, bananas foster is a dish where a sauce is made from butter and brown sugar, bananas are added, then after adding a bit of rum, you light the entire pan on fire.

It's all very good fun.

Lighting things on fire in cooking has a fancy french term (like most other things in cooking) called flambé. In the case of bananas foster, lighting the dish on fire allows two things to occur: caramelization of the bananas, and the burning off of the alcohol in the rum. Unfortunately, as I did my cooking, none of my pictures particularly turned out any good results, as the flame was nearly impossible to see in the sunlight since I was cooking outside (to ensure I didn't destroy anything). But this is a picture I found that gives you the general idea:



The flambé-ing in bananas foster is a way of reducing the liquid in the pan. When using a flame to burn off the alcohol, the water based components of the liquid are left behind. A more traditional form of reduction is simmering a sauce or soup on the stove. So after a few minutes of reducing something on the stove, it usually becomes thicker and the flavors are accentuated because water no longer dilutes it. Reducing on the stove liquids containing alcohol, usually wine or brandy or something of a lower concentration than rum, also gets rid of much of the alcohol. A normal bottle of wine usually contains somewhere between 10-15% alcohol, which is not very much by volume. The boiling point of alcohol is around 173 degrees Fahrenheit, which is more than 30 degrees below that of water at 212. So when cooking down a sauce, the alcohol is actually the first ingredient to begin to vaporize. Flavors become more concentrated when reducing because when the water and the alcohol are both removed, only a little of the original liquid is left, and it has much more concentrated flavor.

By comparison, dark rum like that used in bananas foster contains about 40% alcohol. Why not just use traditional reduction techniques? The first is that because it has such a high alcohol content, flambé is a much more efficient way of reducing the liquid without losing a lot of the water that is necessary to make the sauce for the bananas. The second is that the flame helps to caramelize the sugar on the bananas and really seal in the flavor. Perhaps the third reason is that frankly, who doesn't like to set things on fire?

For those of you who are still curious about the dish in the last post, it was green beans, gnocchi, and fried chicken hearts. If there is one rule I have about food, it is that I will try almost anything once. It's not about what something is, it's about how it tastes. And its amazing what can taste a lot better than you would think. Thanks for reading! As usual, please feel free to comment with any questions!

A Word on Improvisation

Anyone who is a frequent home chef knows that often meals are more based on what's available in the refrigerator than following some recipe. So how can molecular gastronomy play a role in this sort of offhand, improvised cooking? The idea of molecular gastronomy is based on two smaller ideas: using science to improve food, and creating dishes that are innovative and new. Most of this project thus far has focused on the science aspect, but the innovation is probably the more important of the two. The science behind molecular gastronomy cannot function without the ingenuity and creativity behind it. Making some sort of vegetable gel is all well and good, but nobody really wants to have a block of gel as their dinner. The way that science and art come together is best presented in the experimentation of cooking. When we try to create new dishes, we are looking for compatible flavors and textures that are pleasing to the palette, but we also need to ensure that our idea is feasibly executable, and we cannot do that without an understanding of the science behind our food. So, go try something new. Often, molecular gastronomy is simply taking a classic dish and turning each of the elements into something new. Have you ever thought of trying a mexican hot sauce on a chinese dish that needs a little spice? Or, what if you used a dijon mustard foam on top of lamb chops, rather than a traditional sauce? The possibilities are as limitless as the human imagination, and all we have to do is try something new. Not all experiments are delicious successes, but I do believe that you'll be surprised at how often your cooking instict is right.

Since I did not have an actual experiment to go with this post, instead, I have a challenge. Below is a picture of a dish I had on a recent visit to one of my favorite restaurants, Posh. Try and guess what is on this plate! (Hint: Think outside the box). I'll let you know in the next post what it actually is!
Good luck!

A Spectacular Dish

Microwave Magic

What is just about the one kitchen gadget that most households have? If you read the title of the post and guessed microwaves, then you're right!  But, do you actually know how your microwave works? Or is it just a magic box you put cold stuff in and hot stuff comes out? Let's talk a little big about how microwaves work.

Photo owned by Modernist Cuisine. (You didn't think I had a machine shop to make this, did you?)

The photo above shows a microwave that has been cut in half. On the left we have the chamber where you put your food. On the right is a device called a magnetron. (Tell all your friends you have a magnetron and watch them be afraid!) The magnetron uses a transformer to create microwaves, which are a type of electromagnetic radiation. As shown by the white arrows above, the waves propagate (fancy word for move) into the path of a fan, which disperses the waves throughout the chamber and thus heat your food by irradiating the molecules. The word "radiation" generally scares people a bit, so let me be clear: MICROWAVING YOUR FOOD WILL NOT MAKE IT RADIOACTIVE. Well, not any more than it already is. But that is for an advanced physics course to explain. The second thing that is concerning about radiation is that being exposed to it can cause cancer and other health problems. Microwaves are a type of radiation; however, they are contained in the microwave (the cooking device) in a very interesting way.

The most common type of radiation that people generally think of being concerned about is called gamma radiation. Gamma radiation is a very small wave that is so fast that it can pass right through solid objects and scramble their atoms, thus causing the health problems. Microwaves are much, much bigger than gamma waves, and thus can be contained. Gamma waves are about 10^-12 meters long. Microwaves are a few centimeters long. So containing microwaves is relatively simple. The screen door on the front of microwaves are usually plastic with some sort of grating on the front. We don't have to worry about being irradiated because the holes in the front of the microwave are so small that the waves inside are too small to get out! How cool is that? The holes are big enough that we can see through them and watch our food, but small enough that it protects us from the harmful radiation within.

This is a lot of complicated physics, so I did a little experiment that you can do yourself to show how big microwaves are. *Please note that the idea for this belongs to Modernist Cuisine and I have simply repurposed it for the use of showing a concept. All of the pictures are my own.*

First, I cut 10 cubes of cheese out of a block of sharp cheddar (good stuff) and made each subsequent block smaller than the first. I ranged the cubes from about 1in^3 to REALLY REALLY TINY.

On the right we see the REALLY REALLY TINY cube.

Below you see that I arranged them on a plate in a circular fashion so that as the base of the microwave rotates, all of the cheese is affected evenly.

Awww aren't they so....cube! (It's a pun on cute, just FYI).

Then, I put the plate with the cubes in the microwave for 10 seconds. And here's what I found:

Wait....what?

The three largest cubes melted the most, while the small cubes...did nothing. For posterity's sake, I put the plate in for another 10 seconds:

Here are the five smallest cubes...apparently unmelted. They were also quite cool to the touch. But what happened to the big ones?

Here we have....some large puddles of melted cheese. A quick thermometer test said that the melted cheese had reached a temperature of 114 degrees fahrenheit, while the little cubes were room temperature.

So what the heck happened?! The average home cook would shrug their shoulders and eat their melted cheese happily. But us molecular gastronomists demand answers! The answer is in the physics. The microwaves, as we said before, are a few centimeters in length. Half of the cheese cubes were smaller than that, so it is impossible to warm them with microwaves. They're too small to be warmed. If you've ever tried to make chocolate fondue or chocolate dipped strawberries, you usually put chocolate chips in a double boiler. A novice puts a big bowl of chocolate chips in the microwave and it takes FOREVER to warm them. Why? Because each chocolate chip is too small to be affected by the microwaves, so it has to warm the whole bowl rather than each individual chip; it's the same principle. So, the moral of the story is don't put small pieces of food in the microwave--it just won't work.

Liked this post? Let me know in the comments! Any and all questions are welcomed and accepted!

The Great Plan...

So for this post I'm taking a bit of a break from science and going to explain a bit more about my project. Today, I had a meeting with Joshua Hebert, Chef and Owner of Posh Scottsdale, one of my favorite restaurants. We were discussing the menu for a very large and important upcoming dinner I am having.

As part of my senior research project, I must produce something that will help contribute toward my conclusion of my thesis of whether molecular gastronomy is viable for the home cook--and I don't want people to have to take my word for it. So I decided the best way to test this hypothesis is to experiment on *cough* ask for some volunteers to be tasters at a molecular gastronomy dinner I will produce. There were a large number of teachers and administrators at my school BASIS Scottsdale that were more than happy to oblige.

At this point, I have decided that I will do two separate dinners, one with meat, and one vegetarian. The menus at this point are under consideration and will be released only after both of the meals have been executed. Part of the appeal to molecular gastronomy is the experiential portion, and I want it to remain a surprise for all of the guests, some of whom read this blog.

These two dinners will be reviewed by the guests based on very specific criteria that will measure two things: the dinner itself, though this is also very dependent on my cooking and does not reflect the average chef, as well as preconceived notions about food science, cooking, and how they believe it applies in the kitchen.

Any questions about this or the previous posts? Please let me know below and I'm happy to respond to any comments or suggestions!

Under Pressure

Last week, I got a new piece of equipment: a pressure cooker! A pressure cooker uses an ordinary stove and basically acts like a big pot with an airtight lid. Why use a pressure cooker over just an ordinary pot? Pressure cookers can cook things a lot faster than normal methods because of the pressure they build up. At full pressure, most cookers go to about 1 bar, or 15 psi (pounds per square inch). When the pressure in the pot is raised that high, it also increases the boiling point of water from 212 F to about 250F. The difference in temperature accounts for the shorter cooking time. Pressure cookers are also used for canning (which ironically usually uses jars, not cans) at home. I found a recipe for pressure caramelized onions that actually used jars so I decided to try it out as my first pressure cooked recipe.

First, I put onions and baking soda (I still don't know the purpose of the baking soda) into small mason jars with some butter on top of it all. NOTE the caps were screwed on all the way, and then backwards a quarter turn to ensure the jars did not explode. If the caps had been screwed on all the way, the pressure differential between inside and outside the jars could have caused them to rupture.

Ooooo...artsy photography.

Then, I put the jars in the colander-like basket for the pressure cooker, and put about an inch of water in the bottom. I then put them in the pressure cooker for 40 minutes at 1 bar/15psi.

Jars.

Six jars...One pressure cooker....One delicious meal

In this picture you see the jars after cooking. Now, for those who don't know, mason jars that are used at home usually have two parts to their lids, unlike what you would buy at the store. There is a flat piece that goes on top that has the little button that pops after it has been open, and then there is an outer ring that screws on to tighten the flat piece down. (See here). So as I went to unscrew the lids of the jars, all of them came off...except one. Usually pressurized containers have to cool to allow pressure to equalize to the outside in order to open them, but this one was much harder than the others. I let it cool for about half an hour so I could physically pick up the jar, but it still wouldn't budge. Then, I noticed bubbles coming from inside the jar. It was still boiling. Don't believe me? Aha! I have video proof:

Wait, what? The jar was still boiling after half an hour at room temperature...and it was cool enough that I could pick up the jar? After a brief discussion with my physics teacher, we determined that a vacuum must have formed inside the jar, which lowered the boiling point of the water inside the jar. The idea is that as the jar pressurized, the gases expand out of the jar because it is not completely sealed. When the pressure cooker is taken off heat, the gases slowly cool and condense. On this particular jar, it must have happened that the lid was on slightly too tightly so as the pressure increased outside the lid, it created a seal. The cooling of the gases inside the jar caused some of the gas to revert back to liquid or solid in the jar or on the onions (called adsorption [no, thats not a typo]). As these gases became liquid or solid, they were no longer contributing to the overall pressure in the jar. Therefore, an area of negative pressure was created and caused a suction that made the lid nearly impossible to get off. The principle that allows the pressure cooker to be effective also works in reverse. As the pressure inside the jar went down, so too did the boiling point of water. Hence, the remaining water was able to keep boiling at a much lower temperature. After about two hours of cooling, and trying to pry the lid off with a knife, the mixture continued to boil until I used a can opener to create a hole to break the vacuum seal. Pretty cool, huh? I'm not sure how much sense that made, but if you have any questions feel free to comment and let me know! Stay tuned for the next post!

How to Bake a (Very Small) Cake in 35 Seconds!

Have you ever gotten home from a long day and thought, "I could sure go for some cake right now!" Maybe not. But if you were to think that, you would then remember all the work that goes into it and how long it takes to bake and perhaps forgo the whole debacle. But there is a solution! I can bake a cake in 35 seconds. Well, perhaps bake is a bit of a misnomer. I can microwave a cake in 35 seconds. Why can't we apply the same principles we use in the oven to a microwave? A part of molecular gastronomy is about finding ways to simplify cooking. Take a look at how easy this is! *Please note this recipe comes from Modernist Cuisine, but I have adapted part of it to make it even easier.*

A Personal Snack Cake

1. Get a few paper cups.

2. Make your favorite cake batter, or, alternatively, go buy a box of Betty Crocker Super Moist Cake Mix and follow the instructions to create the batter.

3. This is where I differ from Modernist Cuisine. They use a whipping siphon to make the batter light and fluffy. Which works great; however, after a few of my own bench tests, I discovered that you can produce almost the same results as them WITHOUT the whipping siphon! If you have a whipping siphon, then feel free to try it out! (If you have interest in this tool, I recommend an Isi Whipping Siphon, they're not too expensive).

4. Using scissors, cut about three holes in the bottom of the paper cup. Then, grease the bottom and sides of the cup with a nonstick cooking spray or vegetable oil.

5. Fill the cup no more than 1/3 of the way full with batter. It's thick enough that it won't leak out of the bottom.

6. Doing one cup at a time, put a batter-filled cup in the microwave and heat it on high. Microwaves are notorious for differing in their heating times. Modernist Cuisine recommends 1 minute. My microwave preforms best at 35 seconds. Try out a few different times on your own microwave and see what time gives you the fluffiest cake without losing moisture. The batter in the bottom of the cup will rise a surprising amount.

7. Take the cup out of the microwave and turn it upside down on a plate. Give it a few seconds to rest and allow steam to escape, then tap the cup on the plate to allow the cake to fall out.

8. Serve! You can pick almost any flavor you want. Serve individual warm chocolate cakes with fudge or caramel sauce. Serve lemon or vanilla cakes with fruit or freshly whipped cream (it's much better than out of a can, trust me. Also, another good use for a whipping siphon!) It's incredibly easy to do, I was shocked and amazed at how well it work.

Give this a try! Anyone can do this one, leave me a comment and let me know how it goes!