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Death-Defying, High-Tech Cooking With Chefs Dave Arnold and Nils Norén

by Matthew Zuras on October 13, 2010 at 03:45 PM

dave and nils with vacuum machine
Last week we introduced you to Chefs Dave Arnold and Nils Norén, the superhero duo of high-tech culinary artistry that coauthor the brilliant Cooking Issues blog. But that was only a taste, so to speak, of the epic (and, at times, dangerous) demo that the chefs gave us at the French Culinary Institute a few weeks back.

In the video after the break, watch through until the end, when Dave and Nils decided to disengage the safety mechanism on their laboratory centrifuge so that we could watch fig puree being spun at 4000 RPMs -- a practice, Dave cautions, that should not be attempted by anyone, ever. Flirting with the possibility of having a centrifuge bucket smash through our skulls at breakneck speed only made that clarified fig juice taste sweeter. And that, dear readers, is what we call 'BAM.'


But for all of their culinary drama, Dave and Nils insist that the appropriation of lab equipment into their kitchen repertoire isn't just for show. The centrifuge is able to separate solids suspended in liquids (such as the fig puree) with a fraction of the time and energy required to do it with filters, enzymes or previous methods of clarification. (After all, lab centrifuges are used to isolate the platelets from blood samples, and dairies use centrifuges to separate cream from milk.)

But a centrifuge and a rotary evaporator -- essentially a high-tech still, which the chefs used to make deliciously high-proof peanut scotch -- may be a bit out of most home cooks' price range. If you want to start playing around with modern cuisine, high-tech cooking or whatever you want to call it, both Dave and Nils recommend two indispensable gadgets: a powerful blender (the standard seems to be the Vita-Prep) and an immersion circulator. They both admit that these pieces of equipment don't run cheap (although, at $800, PolyScience's SousVide Professional is a comparative deal), but they are extremely versatile. They used the immersion circulator, for example, to heat their creme anglais ice cream base without allowing it to curdle.

Scary-sounding compounds like hydrocolloids (which you know from Jell-O), agar and methylcellulose aren't scary at all, and are actually the cheapest method for experimenting with new textures in the kitchen. (To the natural food naysayers who don't like complex-sounding ingredients, almost all of these products come from natural sources like seaweed and plant enzymes.) We recommend that first-timers check out WillPowder.net (run by Chef Will Goldfarb) if they want to try making their own tasty foams, lipid-based powders and savory gels. Be a mad scientist in the kitchen, and check out the posts at Cooking Issues for more fun with these cutting-edge techniques.

Tags: centrifuge, cooking, DaveArnold, features, food, FrenchCulinaryInstitute, hydrocolloid, ImmersionCirculator, kitchen, KitchenGadgets, NilsNoren, SousVide, SwitchedCooks, top, videos

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