Photo by Lara Kastner
What if a course could change right before your eyes, and your palate, while you were eating it? The interjection of a temperature, texture, aroma, or ingredient would morph the course into two distinctly different ones. With this idea we explore how we can drastically change the identity of a course during mid-consumption.
At first thought this seems like an easy concept, and even one that is already common in the world of restaurants. Some traditional practices hint at it. While eating shabu shabu, you apply heat to various proteins right before consumption, changing them from raw to cooked. The tableside saucing and garnishing of a soufflé adds a flavor component to the dessert, and even the shaving of truffles over pasta produces a changing of the dish after it has left the kitchen. But with all of these examples the course is altered before the guest takes their first bite. Therefore they don't quite exemplify what we are shooting for. I want to create a dish that can be eaten as it is originally presented to the guest, and then at a calculated moment, roughly half way into it, interject a temperature, texture, aroma, or ingredient that essentially creates a new dish entirely.
As we started to explore the idea of the Jekyll and Hyde concept it became apparent that it would require additions dealing in areas of extreme to successfully transform the food enough, and change the eating experience of the dish dramatically to meet our goal.
In a moment, everything has changed, even the utensil required to eat moves from fork to spoon.The first way we approached this was extreme temperature additions. Obviously as cooks we change the properties of food on a daily basis in the kitchen by applying heat to various foodstuffs. That is what cooking is all about...and we are cooks. This is no doubt why we looked to this familiar direction first.
We have played with cooking at the table before. By placing food on hot river stones or custom made service ware designed to be both a cooking surface and a plate, we were able to bring the elements of the preparation typically isolated to the kitchen (smells, sounds, and participation) to the dining room. But the food arrived basically in its final state and the eating experience was one-dimensional.
But imagine a salad-like composition of raw vegetables with supporting garnishes including starch based crunchy components that act as croutons, encapsulated herb juices exploding with vinaigrette freshness, and pudding-like condiments of liquefied cheese being transformed by the application of a rich, extremely hot, dairy-based broth, being poured over the course at the midway point of consumption. The former light, crunchy, and cold characteristics of the salad turn into a rich, hot soup. In a moment, everything has changed, even the utensil required to eat moves from fork to spoon.
The crouton elements turning into dumpling like textures while they take on liquid, the vegetables yield from the tableside cooking process, and the spherified herb juices become floating raviolis of much needed brightness in the rich, chowder-like soup.
Could we apply dry heat sources and get a similar effect?
What about reversing the order and adding liquid nitrogen, turning a hot soup into a sorbet or ice cream?
The thought of this mid-consumption transformation was exciting to me, so I started to think of other themes beyond the obvious addition of temperature. Could we make a dish taste entirely different by introducing a smell?
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Well, there is that Miracle Fruit that changes our perception, but I guess that's not the direction you're going...
I'm reminded of drinking absinthe from a fountain, where the addition of ice water changes the color, taste, temperature, and aroma of the drink.
What about a "fountain" at the table from which each guest (or a server) decides when to dispense this type of liquid agent?
What about fragrant, heated oil?
Rig up the soup/salad dish á la the idol pedestal in Raiders of the Lost Ark. The bowl that the salad is served in is placed on a scale of sorts such that when half of the salad (by weight) is eaten, a pressure plate under the bowl rises up, triggering the release of the liquid into the bowl. It would require some fairly intricate design work to create the bowl, but you Alinea guys are pretty good at commissioning odd tableware. :)
Some ideas:
- Bringing out a broth or somesuch halfway through, turning a carpaccio into shabu shabu or a composed salad into a fondue.
- Add an aromatic to the table halfway through that changes the flavor of a dish.
- Some sort of chemical reaction that slowly heats up?
Another traditional example: Apple pie a la mode - unless you scarf it down, you start with warm pie and cold ice cream, by the end, you have creamy apple compote. (Personally, I dislike the melting - I always pester the poor diner waitress to get the ice cream in a separate bowl, then take spoonfuls of each to get the warm/cold contrast in my mouth - the ice cream stays ice cream - yeah, I know I'm un-American or something. ;^) )
Since I've been playing with maltodexterin powders, I've been trying to think of a combination that would transform in the mouth with each spoonful. Something powdered with a subtle flavor that dissolves immediately on the tongue, with an encapsulated element that dissolves slowly and releases a new flavor that combines with or overwhelms the initial flavor. (Maybe it's as simple as alginate caviar - the alginate "skin" is usually flavorless, so it would delay releasing the inner flavor until you chew?)
These transformations can have additional "side-effects" I'm thinking of a piece of serviceware with something that arrives frozen in an "upper bowl", that melts over time, running down into a lower bowl, combining with elements there into something different.
Does this have to be "one course"? Could a dish arrive early in the dinner, be sampled or partially consumed, then moved to the center of the table, where it transforms over an hour or more, and is "returned" to the diner in its new state? It could be something fascinating to watch (melting: oil rising through ice as it melts?) or changing color? rising through fermentation?), building anticipation during the evening. Lots of potential "lab demonstrations": sous vide sur la table, table top dehydration, smoking an item - perhaps too "techy", though.
You mentioned shabu shabu (bringing to mind all the cook-at-the-table dishes of East and Southeast Asia), though you didn't specifically mention the noodles that get thrown in near the end, turning it into noodle soup.
Chinese sizzling rice soup, for some reason doesn't every get presented in a two-stage process, but maybe your article will inspire a Chinese (or fusion) chef or two.
If you added the roux in the middle of a meal, would jambalaya turn into étouffée?
Hot oil (or broth) poured over a salad would be good. I look forward to what you all come up with.
I think cookiejesus hasn't given themselves enough credit. Something like the Miraclefruit could be added to a dish in powder form, and assuming that the individual doesn't scarf the food down ridiculously fast, the flavor of the dish will change as they continue to eat it.
While the presentation and approach to eating the dish hasn't changed, the flavor certainly has.
In terms of dev/nall's idea, you don't necessarily need a scale and pressure plate to trigger the pouring of the soup... If you use some type of designed tableware that has the ability to tilt as you eat it, you could trigger the release of the liquid by forcing the individual to eat from a certain side of the "dish". Imagine some form of serving dish that is shaped like the letter C, standing up. Potentially, place the salad ingredient in the bottom curve of the C and the liquid stored in the top of the C (perhaps a spout/fluted form?). By forcing the individual to eat from the back of the C (near the curve) towards the end, each bite would tip the C a little bit making it rock. As some point the weight of the leftover salad could tip the C forward just enough to pour the liquid into the remaining salad... It would be quite the game in balance/counter balance for the dish to work. Or instead of using the salad as the counterweight (to prevent counting each leaf), you could apply a hanging weight to the bottom end of the C which can be counterbalanced with the salad in the curve.
What an interesting concept/idea...
Kind of like a Tootsie pop idea, with a surprise ingredient in the middle?
You could do something with a soup where you place it in a bowl (hot) and add a gel-filled sac that contains a reactant that will cause the liquid to evaporate when the sac is pierced. I don't know what you would need to do that, but it could be cool.
I normally don't post, but I'm a huge fan of your work and can't get this article out of my head, so just a few thoughts.
I really think the answer is going to be in the structural design of the plate the food is sent on. Picture a long plate with 35 degree incline, and a bowl-shaped indentation at the top, and a rivet in the center of the plate running from the bowl at the top, down to a shallower bowl at the bottom. To pour a hot gel into the top, even a reduced demi-glace, you're going to end up with a soup, because the mass of the soup will maintain enough heat to keep it at a liquid state. However, as the soup runs down the rivet, it'll form a (loose) gelee at the base. The downside is that there'll be a stream of gelee stuck to the rivet in the plate. Irksome details.
Even so, heating/cooling isn't going to give much variety to the concept of food changing mid way through a meal. Ultimately, we're only going to get three possible outcomes, A liquid, a solid, or a gas, the same as with water. If one were to melt a gelee or gratinee into a soup, or turn that soup into a vapor, or condense a vapor back into a soup, or whatever, the options are still limited. I think the "solid sauce" idea seems like a good place to start from, how many textures can you coax out of that while maintaining the same principal component? Is there a way to dehydrate it to a point that there's a notable crunch, and as time and possible some moisture is added, it becomes a soup? Or maybe a way to make a gelee crunchy with the passage of time? It'd be cool to see some tableside cooking, but wouldn't it be even cooler to see a change in food precipitated from the ktichen?
hope you have better luck than I'm having
To play off of the sashimi / shabu shabu or salad into soup idea, I think you could server a concentrated soup stock/base in a cylindrical container with a perfectly fitted ice cube over top. As the heat from the soup melts the ice, the ingredients would fall into the liquid.
The timing and flavor components can further be altered by creating an ice cube that has multiple layers/sections that are flavored with different ingredients.
Its tough to think of CHANGE when the likes of u ,Heston Blumenthal and Ferran Adria talk of.
I think using of heat to change ur eggnog to custard. or using anti-griddle to make a disc of a liquid(soup/sauce).
or u can give dumplings by the sidewith certain reactants(aromatics/gelling agents) with soups which a customer can whenever he/she wants to.