Playing with your food

I recommend this New York Times article about avant-garde cuisine. You may be just starting to hear about this trend, but it's been the hot thing in international cuisine for some time now. It's postmodern cuisine, where food is not just cooked but deconstructed and transformed. As an example of the kind of thing we're talking about, consider a "riff on a peanut butter and jelly sandwich: a peeled, heated grape, still on a sprig, that had been dipped in a peanut puree and encased in a thin layer of brioche."

The founder and darling of this mad-scientist cuisine is Barcelona's Ferran Adrià, whose restaurant El Bulli is only open 6 months of the year so he can spend the rest of the year in his culinary laboratory. Want to eat there? So does everyone else; it's booked up a year in advance. Adrià's most famous innovation is the culinary foam, which brings your food down to a concentrated, ephemeral form.

The NYT wrote a while back that the most exciting cooking in the world is now found in Spain instead of France. That's almost a blasphemous thing to say, but by all accounts Adrià can back up the boast. Here's one convert's experience, while here are photos from one of his famous multi-hour 27 course tasting menus.

Here's an example of what he's up to: he created a potato skin consomme in which were floating a ball of pumpkin seed oil, a liquefied olive and pouches of softened butter, all of which were in special edible skins to keep them from melting. As the NYT reviewer says, "by remaining intact and independent, these pouches provided spikes of richness that would not have been possible if the butter had merely melted into the soup."

In New York, Wylie Dufresne is the most famous chef of this school. At his restaurant WD-50, he uses science to create "impossible" new food experiences such as "cubes of mayonnaise that can be deep-fried without melting...served beside pickled beef tongue in a deconstruction of a deli sandwich" or oysters pressed into papery flat rectangles before being deep-friend and served with granny smith apples, dried olives, and pistachios. His restaurant has gotten mixed reviews, but those who love it really love it.

The cuisine might be untraditional, but it's not stodgy, and often plays with lowbrow food references, such as using crushed corn nuts as a steak crust, or serving "crushed Altoids instead of mint jelly with lamb [and] lollipops of foie gras encrusted with Pop Rocks." In the words of one chef, "Why not go to the store and get the curiously strong mint? [It's more interesting than] that horribly boring quote, 'I love to use farm-fresh products and local ingredients and European technique.' "

Me, I love farm-fresh local ingredients and classic technique...but then, maybe it's just sour foam. Anyone want to be an Urban Honking research granter and send an investigative team to Spain???