My review of the Molecular Cusine Starter Kit, from ThinkGeek

So, ThinkGeek is offering something that looked so fun and fantastic that I had to get it. 
http://www.thinkgeek.com/homeoffice/kitchen/e71f/

This kit was $79.99 and came with a few things so that you can work your way through all 50 something recipes. 

The box with the "T" on it, is for the tools, like a slotted spoon, pipettes and some other fun stuff.  I have already made some caviar the regular way so I thought I would try their version of spherification would be fun because it would allow for a broad application.  I tried the ravioli recipe first and that meant that I was adding chemicals to drinkable yogurt and making medium sized spherical shapes in the bath to produce something as cool as below:

This is a strawberry flavored ravioli.  It was just as it was supposed to be.  The outside was a thin layer of gel as the inside was still liquid.  I think that the kit is great for those who want to get into Molecular Gastronomy or Molecular Cuisine and don't know how to get in.  The instructions are easy that someone new could get whatever they wanted out of this.  Be caution though: these type of recipes require patience and a keen eye for measurements.  If you are not strong in these virtues, find someone else to make this cool food. 

A short allegorical and metaphorical view of molecular gastronomy....

Wow, that title did it didn't it?  I'm sure if you told others what you were reading they would think you are super smart and you are because you are reading my blog.  Some people don't know what I do when I tell the about molecular gastronomy and a good way that I can describe it is this: when you go driving and you see some one's license plate that has a strange saying on it, you try to figure it out but sometimes it is difficult.  So you see a plate that says something like:

PRPLHRT

What could that be?  Well, if you play around with it, prep, preple, preplert?  Well, I made it to say "purple heart".  Do you see it now?

I think of this being a metaphor to molecular gastronomy because with the molecular gastronomy, you some are basically making something of different components that when together may not resemble but work just like the inspiration.  For instance: do you like BLT's?  What if you were offered a plate with two pieces of white toast, with mayo on the sides, a thick and juicy tomato, a crisp piece of lettuce and a few strips of bacon?  That is the traditional view of the BLT.  My take on molecular gastronomy has to do with the science of cooking a BLT and then challenges me to make something that tastes like that sandwich, but to me completely different.  My idea was to have an Asian soup spoon and inside of it place some bread crumbs.  On top of the bread crumbs would be some powdered bacon, then some lettuce foam and on top of the foam would be some tomato caviar.  Should it would look a lot different, but with each bite, you would taste something that tastes juts like a BLT sandwich.  That is molecular gastronomy to me.

So, try to do something different or make some sort of food different.  Make something that tastes the same but looks and feels different.

An imperfect sphere...

Ever since I saw an episode of Top Chef, in which the chef made some food into spheres, I was hooked, thinking it was the best way and a brand new method. After all this time I thought that food was cooked the way it was given, as in, the only way to change the texture of food was to do it by juicing it or mashing it. A carrot has the carrot texture unless you juice it or mash it then it has a liquid texture and mashed potato texture.

So, as great chefs like the ones at WD50 and El Bulli have shown us, using chemicals we can drastically change the texture of things. After reading a free downloadable book on textures and hyrocolloids, by Martin Lercsh, I was very interested in other hydrocolloids. Recipe upon recipe of spherification gave ideas for me to try. One of the recipes used olives and making olive juice and then dripping it into ice cold oil, making the spheres form there. A good idea and worked for the mixologist in the video, but not for me.

I did the next best thing, finding a place that sold a mixture of an unknown percentage of sugar and sodium alginate, I thought it was pure sodium alginate but was mistaken, I used it anyway, using twice as much as the recipe called for. I also bought some calcium chloride for use as well. The recipe had me taking a soda, boiling it a bit, then adding the sodium alginate, or in my case, adding a bunch of the mixture.

I let it cool so it would start to gel. I then mixed water and the calcium chloride and dripped the soda mixture into the water one.
Little spheres formed perfectly and floated to the bottom of the bowl.
I then poured the whole bowl over a sieve and collected the water in another bowl, underneath, to be used again. I rinsed the caviar off in water, then dipped in a separate bowl of clean water. When I had enough, I placed them in a white dish and thought they looked like caviar, my wife, the sushi lover, thought it looked like flying fish roe.
However, the taste wasn't what I had expected: The small balls of strawberry soda flavor, had a gummy shell but a juice on the inside, like a paintball. I rinsed them off multiple times but still, there was a salty or sour flavor afterwards, which could have come from the calcium chloride since it is a salt. I have read online that people say that it has no taste, but it clearly does. It was an interesting process and I am very happy to have done it, but this may not be something I would do many many times.

molecular gastronomy

Molecular gastronomy isn't a new term but it is new that you may have heard it. Originally known as the science of food and cooking, it has become a term for new science techniques applied to food. For example: while adding gelatin to foods and liquids is nothing new, it seems that using it in new ways is. In this video with Jamie Boudreau, he takes a simple liquid and adding gelatin to it, makes it a jelly-like consistency that when added to an oil, causes the item to come together and form balls or "caviar" that help make any dish new and exciting.
http://www.smallscreennetwork.com/video/26/molecular_mixology_aviation/#vcx_xocz9tdg4081

In this site, carrot caviar was made using a similar idea pattern but different solutions.
http://www.instructables.com/id/Carrot-Caviar/

A hydrocolloid is the term that describes gelatin es and things like agar or pectin that can tern a liquid into a solid or a jelly-like state. So, for any of you experimentalists out there, try playing with your food.

The science behind a cookie.

Cooking is both an art and a skill. It uses creativity, risk, science and math in order to pull out a good dish out of just about anything. Just ask Morimoto about the strange ingredients he is given and the wondrous concoctions that he creates. The biggest thing that draws me into cooking is the science and math, which is thrown together under the gastronomy term: the science of cooking. While there is a simple recipe to making chocolate chip cookies, the hard part is not making them with white chocolate chips instead of milk-chocolate, but instead taking out many or replacing many of the ingredients becomes more of a trail-and-error with science and math.

For example: I am working on a low GL chocolate chip cookie. Whoa, wait, what? What's a GL? Okay, let's start from scratch. A GL is an abbreviation for a Glycemic Load, which is the amount of sugars that enter your bloodstream and how long it stays in your body before being countered by the insulin your body releases. So, if you eat something that has a high GL, say of 50, then that means that even after your body releases insulin to deal with the sugars in it, it will take a longer time for those sugars to dissipate than an item that has a lower amount of GL's. Now GL's measure the sugars in an item and if there is too much sugar in an item, more than your body can handle, the excess sugar in your blood stream can mess with your body, causing headaches, fatigue, mood swings or get stored as fat. So watching your glycemic load levels day-to-day can help you feel healthy, stay healthy, and help you lose wait.

Now, my recipe for chocolate chip cookies calls for 3/4th of a cup of packed brown sugar. A cup of brown sugar has about 1 tablespoon of molasses and 1 cup of white sugar. Well, that means that a 3rd of a cup of brown sugar has about 1 & 1/2 teaspoons of molasses. Molasses is relatively low on the GL scale and when mixed with something that can act as a sweetener in its place, like 3/4ths of a cup of Stevia, you get something that tastes like brown sugar, but has almost no GL's and almost no calories.

But while the math is there, I had to play around with the science. Sugar plays an important roll in cooking and baking. In cookies, it helps create the texture. The first step is to mix butter with the sugars, to creme them together. The idea is that the sugar mixes with the butter while it pulls air into the mixture. The sugar helps to tear pockets in the fat and air fills the gaps. This creates a creamy texture for the base of the cookies. When they tell you that the butter needs to be room temperature, this is important as the temperature and the softness of the butter determines how easy it is to create the fluffiness of the cookies. If the butter is too cold, you will have super fluffy cookies that would come up as large and crunchy and if your butter is warm then your cookies will become flat and soft and chewy.

That texture, shows through to when the cookies are cooked as well. As if the cookies have air pockets made from the sugar and butter, then the air heats up and cooks its little cell, creating a crunchy cookie. If there are not as many air pockets, then the air only heats up it's immediate area, which normally is just the whole cookie, allowing for cookies that are still soft and chewy.

In the case of my stevia/molasses use, it functions the same way, as far as tearing through the butter to create the air pockets for the cookie. However without the addition of unnecessary calories, it works better for everyone will delivering the same thing. The glycemic load of the molasses and stevia would be 4.5 GL's. Whereas the glycemic load of 3/4ths of a cup of brown sugar would normally have roughly 113 GL's.

What this is leading up to, is a low GL sugar-free chocolate chip cookie. One that doesn't taste like the sugar-free cookies in the store, but one that tastes like a normal fat filled, sugary and rich cookie. No one one a sugar-free diet will touch a sugar-free cookie, unless it tastes good. As my mantra of a chef, "if it doesn't taste good, don't eat it", there is no reason that diabetics and dieters should be forced to eat anything different than the rest of us.