Better Living Through Introspection

Ratings for Kettle Chips I’ve personally tried. Because I can.

Update! I just discovered Kettle’s “Island Jerk” at the local Whole Paycheck. So good!

Flavor	Type	Rating
New! Island Jerk (jammin’ jamaican spice)	Krinkle Cut
Tuscan Three Cheese (mediterranean vacation in a bag)	Chips
Spicy Thai (ginger with attitude)	Chips
Aged White Cheddar	Bakes
Buffalo Bleu (brazen spice mellowed by bleu cheese)	Krinkle Cut
New York Cheddar with herbs (bold grown-up cheese)	Chips
Lightly Salted (pure organic perfection)	Organic
Salt & Fresh Ground Pepper (the yin yang of space)	Krinkle Cut

Icons courtesy IconBuffet. Set: Shanghai Smilies. If you’re interested in the free icons, do me a favor and sign-up for free deliveries using my referral link.

After a recent trip to mini bar at Café Atlántico, I was so amazed and inspired by the food that I decided to learn how to recreate one of the 30 diminutive dishes served to us during the course of a two-hour meal: the mojito. “But that’s just a drink, ” you say. “Oh, no,” I counter, “It’s not at all.” The mojito at mini bar is a bite-sized sphere of rum, lime and mint that seems to defy physics: it looks solid, but changes to liquid the moment you pop it in your mouth. (A quick scan of the Interwebs reveals this blog entry, complete with photo of the mojito sphere, that describes the mini bar with some detail. [Note to A Certain Someone: note that the blog's author actually bought her better half the Texturas ingredients so that he could try the same techniques himself. Hint, hint. And no, I don't know who they are, it's just an extremely convenient coincidence.])

The chefs at mini bar are very open to discussing some of their techniques and even encourage customers to ask questions, so a rough concept of the technique was already formed in my mind by the time we left. However, some digging around quickly revealed that what was new to me has been around, not surprisingly, for years.

Essentially, there is a style of food preparation and presentation known as molecular gastronomy — though, it seems, the practicioners of this food science insist that it should never be referred to as such — that emphasizes the physics and chemistry of cooking. (At the risk of going too far off track, interest in molecular gastronomy [but don't call it that] has its epicenter in Spain, at a (now legendary) restaurant called el Bulli, which is run by Chef Ferran Adrià [about whom much has been written] — Cafe Atlántico’s José Andrés [also of local faves Oyamel and Jaleo] studied under Adrià for a time, bringing this long aside finally to a round close.)

One of Ferran Adrià’s molecular gastronomy gimmicks is sferificación — spherification, if you will (though Firefox spell-check won’t) — in which a liquid “filling” containing a small amount of a brown seaweed derivative known as sodium alginate is dropped in to a bath of calcium chloride. The reaction between the sodium alginate and the calcium chloride forms a thin membrane around the filling, sealing it into a sphere. Sounds so simple, right? Only with practice.

Armed with my new-found knowledge, gleaned from a few hours of web browsing and two viewings of Decoding Ferran Adria (hosted by Anthony Bourdain), I began preparing for my own spherification experiment. Luckily, my interest in this was piqued well-in to the trend’s lifespan, so the special food-quality chemical ingredients are actually easy to find now…had I been a year or two sooner, I’d be extremely disheartened. I ordered my sodium alginate and calcium chloride from Will Powder (clever, no?), found a scale (precise measurements call for scales) at the local Linens-N-Things (or was it a Bed, Bath, & Beyond?) claiming to be accurate to 1 gram, and was all set to go.

I figured my first experiment might not even be edible, so for the sake of ease I decided to simply try focusing on figuring out ratios and timing. Instead of food ingredients, I simply used water with a little blue food coloring for the filling. I’m pretty sure I used to much alginate, as the filling was viscuous to the point of having a high gross factor. You wouldn’t want a ball of shave gel exploding in your mouth, right? The calcium bath was easy…I think it’s kinda hard to mess-up that half.

The really difficult and frustrating part was the actual sphere-making. Thanks to Decoding Ferran Adria and the world’s longest thread on the topic of spherification, I had a vague notion of how everything should work. But there’s such a difference between reading about something and actually doing it yourself.

I’ll save the exact details for when I get the system down (no sense in leading anyone astray here), so for now I’ll leave you with the photo of the result of my first Spherification Experiment.

The new season of Hell’s Kitchen premieres on Monday, June 4. Hell, yeah.

Chef and restaurateur Roberto Donna is so fed up with bad food critics that he’s starting his own blog to criticize their critiques.

A Scorching Response To A Food Critic
By Amy Argetsinger and Roxanne Roberts

Bad reviews are an occupational hazard of the restaurant business, and most chefs just bellyache or cry in their soup. Not award-winning Roberto Donna, who’s started a high-profile food fight with Washingtonian magazine dining editor Todd Kliman. Donna is so upset about the review in this month’s issue that he’s starting a blog to critique local restaurant critics. “If you want to write a bad review, that’s fine,” he told us. “But write it with the truth.”

I wish I could link to Donna’s blog, but apparently he hasn’t actually started it yet:

Donna’s unnamed blog is slated to begin next month, and he’s printing up thousands of bumper stickers for his customers and fellow chefs: “Don’t Believe the Washingtonian.”

Of course, some critics (at least, the blogging kind) might be tempted to purposely say something bad about Donna in order to gain page views from the upcoming anti-critic blog. Should be fun to watch!

According to Kolleen Guy, author of When Champagne Became French: Wine and the Making of a National Identity, the bubbly that we know and love today can be credited to bad storage techniques of English consumers and not the ingenuity of French wine makers.

Once shunned as a trick by producers to cover the harsh tastes of bad wines, sparkling wine became fashionable with the trend-setting grande monde. Historians now generally agree that “sparkling wine first appeared among the consumers rather than the producers because it was a by-product of conservation techniques rather than the deliberate outcome of winemaking practice.” The bubbles occurred naturally when wine was made late in the year and the winter cold paralyzed the yeasts that normally turn grape sugars into alchohol. Warm spring weather reactivated the yeast, and the fermentation began again, producing a carbonic gas that created a slight “sparkle” in ordinarily still wine.

While reading When Champagne Became French, I was surprised to learn that the syndicate of champagne producers (the ominous sounding Syndicate was a group composed of the vignerons — the peasant wine growers — and the négociants — merchant-manufacturers) were using public relations tactics in the late nineteenth century that seem more twentieth century to “sell the story” (if you will) of champagne.

As part of a new range of social symbols for the aspiring elite, champagne could readily be exploited by those who supplied it. Yet this symbol of the French nation was a regional wine…Being a regional product but promoted as a national good in advertising and marketing spectacles, champagne gave the community that controlled its production a singular importance within the nation.

The Syndicate published pamphlets and articles that reinforced the notion that champagne was a symbol of the glory of France.

[They popularized] the unique genius of both the regional wines and the community by means of a number of myths about the industry and its “founders.” Probably the most infliential and most enduring concerned the “discovery” of sparkling wine. The largely forgotten monk Dom Pierre Pérignon was resurrected as the inventor of sparkling wine and the founder of the champagne industry. The creation of this myth is generally attributed to Dom Grossard, a former Benedictine monk…determined to memorialize the great “achievements” of the abbey.

Grossard began a letter writing campaign in 1821 based entirely on fiction (though Pérignon was a wine-maker, he did not invent champagne) and by the 1860s, authors writing about the region

unquestioningly attributed the discovery of the “secret” of sparkling wine to Dom Pérignon, who by now had been tranformed into a blind monk who used his highly developed senses of smell and taste to create the finest blend of wines. But Dom Pérignon’s “resurrection” did not have widespread recognition until the Syndicat du commerce began to use it for commercial purposes. At the 1889 Exposition universelle in Paris, the Syndicat provided the public with an illustrated pamphlet that reproduced the Dom Pérignon story, declaring him to have been the “father” of sparkling wine. After tasting the wines of Champagne, the visitors could carry away this souvenir, sharing the Dom Pérignon story with friends and family in France and abroad. In 1896, the Syndicat produced a pamphlet entitled *Le Vin de Champagne* that unequivocally stated that Dom Pérignon had “discovered” champagne by following “ancient traditions.”

…in June 1914, the bicentennial of Dom Pérignon’s “discovery” was commermorated with a special color-illustrated issue. Under a drawing of Dom Pérignon, looking strikingly like St. Francis of Assisi opening a bottle of champagne, was the caption: “It was exactly two hundred years ago that Dom Pérignon, a Benedictine monk, discovered the art of making the wines of Champagne sparkle.”

While Grossard’s efforts were intended to promote the prestige of the Catholic Church, the myth of Dom Pérignon “served the more secular purpose of seducing the champagne-drinking public.”

Despite the almost industrial techniques used in sparkling wine production, the Dom Pérignon myth distanced champagne from any association with assembly lines, technology, and backbreaking labor. The monk’s “simple” invention was cultivated in public relations campaigns to create an image of champagne as being as effortless to create as it was to drink, a symbol of a balance between old-world traditions and the “good life” of the modern period.

As intriguing as these insights are into the creation of champagne, I found the thoroughness of When Champagne Became French a burden — this book, according to the foreward, began as a doctoral dissertation and unfortunately it reads as such…I didn’t make it beyond the second chapter. I would recommend this book to you strictly if you’re a dedicated oenologist or a hardcore Francophile.