CITY Issue 52

CITY LIFE Living the Good Life in the Big City THE AMUSED BOUCHE Artificial Elegance ‘Local,’ ‘organic,’ and ‘natural’ may be the buzz words du jour in dining, but for CITY’s Eva Hagberg, chemical-infused processed food isn’t as scary as it sounds. I HAVE A CONFESSION: I LOVE SKIPPY PEANUT BUTTER. I GREW up on natural, organic, grind-it-yourself peanut (sometimes almond, sometimes cashew, sometimes filbert) butter that my parents got at the coop in Eugene “Anarchy Capital of the World,” Oregon. My family, in all its iterations, always ate well, but it was always organic, natural, unprocessed. I was that kid with the pumpernickel-and-salami sandwiches, the unsweetened apple juice, the banana for dessert—except, that is, for when I could convince an accomplice to slip me a little Super Chunk. And that is probably why, now, 20 years later and 48 states away, it’s still me and Skippy. And that—not to mention a general affection for the totally weird—is probably why I was little kid–excited to see and taste former WD-50 pastry chef Sam Mason’s foie gras and peanut butter terrine at his long-awaited, just-opened small-plates place, Tailor. The terrine was like Skippy that had gone to space and—to quote every sci-fi movie ever—come back, “forever changed.” Although my co-astronaut and I couldn’t tell if we loved it or hated it (its insanely fine-grained smoothness might have been almost too too) it brought me back to the early days of what counted then—as a sneaky, Skippy-eating five-year-old—as trespass, what I see now—as a slightly less-sneaky molecular gastronomy fan—as process. It’s not only Skippy; I love anything processed and artificial. And that’s why, at the same time that the 100-mile commandment is trumping the five-second rule, I’m glad to be seeing more of it. Translating my childhood-inspired love of things-that-come-in-packages into a (slightly more) grown-up iteration of things-that-have-been-played-with started two years ago with Wylie Dufresne’s shrimp “couscous” (the crustacean chopped up into tiny grain-like bits), and then, last year, took vise-like grip of my imagination at Chicago’s Alinea, where the brilliant Grant Achatz deconstructed a tomato into its flavors and built it back up out of cocoa butter and smoked paprika. I came across that playful artificiality again at Tailor, where Mason did things to watermelon that even the freakishly good snapper it came under couldn’t hold a candle to. He could have done the dish—which also (just for the hell of it, it seems) involves avocado-and-pistachio ice cream— straight with unprocessed fruit. But that extra little touch, that extra little squeeze that made the menu read “compressed watermelon” and made the fruit taste more like a new Trident flavor than a summer picnic actually made a difference, turning what could have been a watery “oh, okay, that’s cool” addition into a moment of textural invention-becomes-necessity. There’s tension in the ranks, though, between the artificials and the straightforwards, and Mason’s mentor Dufresne came up against the ultra-old-school Joël Robuchon during back-to-back cooking demonstrations at September’s International Chefs Congress. Dufresne, who went first, showed how he mixed melted foie gras terrine, konjac flour, xanthan gum, and egg yolk, spread the amalgamation out on a pan, stuck it in the fridge, took it out, cut it into ribbons, and tied it—this is essentially foie gras, remember—into the prettiest little bow. It’s awesome, funny, playful, and, Dufresne insisted, delicious. (I tried it a few days later at the photo shoot for this column. It is.) “I don’t think tying it in a knot is something that Escoffier would do,” he admitted, but reminded everyone that using terrine instead of just melting a lobe of liver shows that the dish is about much more than looks. Great success until Robuchon counterpointed with a demonstration on how to cook spinach sous-vide. The ingredients? Leaves, oil, salt. And that, Robuchon said through a translator, is all you need. “I promise you,” he said, addressing the young people. “Years from now all these additives will be completely eliminated from cooking.” Robuchon stopped holding back and called what these playful gastronomists are doing “cerebral masturbation.” Oooh, snap. But, really, what’s wrong with a little selfpleasure in the name of culinary development? And, really, what’s wrong with a little fakery, trickery, artificiality? I call Jing Tio, who owns Le Sanctuaire—the San Francisco–based supplier for everything from Japanese Deep Ocean salt to methyl cellulose and for everyone from Dufresne to the kitchen at Jean Georges—to ask him how the processed-stuff business is going. (Well.) He now sells the company’s molecular gastronomy-friendly ingredients on his website (www.lesanctuaire.com), so you too can buy a bag of Kelcogel for just $32 and make your own pulp-suspending grapefruit juice. Tio says that using these powders is not so much about introducing artificiality as it is about just processing ingredients differently, in a way that keeps them closer to real. His example is thickening carrot juice with odorless xanthan gum instead of cooking it to a reduction, which would taste completely different and in turn make the flavor far more “processed” than just introducing a scary-sounding chemical compound would. Xanthan is also, Tio points out, just as organically derived as my dreaded childhood straight-from-the-co-op spread. Tio isn’t the only one pushing the processing. Will Goldfarb, who used to own and run the process-heavy (vacuum-packed raspberry crisp anyone?) Room 4 Dessert in Manhattan (word is he’s looking for a new space for a new version) and now operates Picnick out of Battery Park, is giving home chefs the chance to indulge their artificiality jones with his recently launched Willpowder line. Because nothing makes dinner taste better than a little tapioca maltodextrin and sodium citrate. Looming above it all, of course, is the grandfather of it all, the mack daddy of messing with your food, El Bulli’s Ferran Adria, who has the most playful approach to all of this with his own line, which launched last year. “Texturas” includes a section called “Surprises” that in turn includes “Fizzy.” It’s a powder that, yes, just gives things a fizz, and that, it seems, can be enough. “Texturas” come in brightly colored cans with happy-looking font, and they’re the ones that show why Adria still reigns supreme. He’s the original argument for why faking it to make it can—and should—be fun. So now please excuse me while I go tie up my Super Chunk. 38 CI T Y P H OTO B Y A N T H O N Y C R O S S .

Table of Contents Feed for the Digital Edition of CITY Issue 52

CITY Issue 52 Contents Letter from CITY Our Friends Action Wanted City Moment In Rogue Fit The Amused Bouche Fast Food Must Haves Hot Wheels Idol Handlers Design Public Affairs Pluck of the Draw Novel Ideas Monster's Belle Not Guilty The Understudies The Hunger Elastique Where to Buy It Socials Icon

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