Tuesday, October 28, 2008

Molecular Gastronomy: a foody masturbates

Sunday, I learned a few of the basic processes that makes up this movement of Molecular Gastronomy.

Mostly, I find it wanking off about food... more so than usual, that is. I appreciate it on an esoteric, aesthetic level, but I find that when I want to eat a mushroom, I actually want to eat a mushroom and not just breathe the flavor in a foam. I like texture and chewing. I don't necessarily want essence of pea puree to explode in my mouth like stale baby food.

The most successful dish, I thought, was the seared duck breast (because it was cooked conventionally) which was topped with pineapple caviar. I did like these little bursts of fruity flavor and will probably be taking this technique home with me. The sweet and acid flavors of the caviar worked nicely to offset the fattiness of the duck.

In order to make this "caviar," combine juice with sodium alginate (a thickener) and then dribble drops into a calcium chloride bath. Osmosis sucks the water out of the juice drop and creates a cell wall around the drop. An example from Youtube:

Wednesday, October 22, 2008

Cooking for Gordon

I had a dream last night that I was cooking for Gordon Ramsay. Unlike my dream of Anthony Bourdain, this was not a sex dream.

Instead, it was about learning, gaining knowledge, and earning approval.

Friday, October 17, 2008

TV Review: Presidential Campaign

I realized that these debates are really bad television. In good serial TV, each episode builds on what the viewer knows from past episodes and rewards the repeat viewer. Finely crafted TV is good enough to suck in new viewers without being boring to repeat viewers. These debates -- and probably presidential campaigns in general -- are REALLY BAD TV.

They just repeat the same things over and over... "he voted present," "he's going to raise your taxes," "use a scapel instead of a hatchet," "he started his campaign in a terrorist's living room," etc.

This does not reward the repeat viewer AT ALL.

Tony Soprano for President!