At Alinea, recently named the top restaurant in the country by Gourmet magazine, a tiny “fruit leather” packet made from dehydrated yuzu juice holds a peanut concoction that liquefies when it hits your tongue.
Over at Avenues, the Peninsula Chicago’s posh restaurant, Graham Elliot Bowles keeps a container of carbon dioxide-buzzed Pop Rocks on hand in case the chef decides to cook up a dish like his candy-crusted foie-gras lollipops.
At Moto, in the Fulton Market district, chef Homaro Cantu serves a salmon dish enveloped in smoke.
OK, it’s not exactly smoke–it’s a colloidal dispersion of water droplets.
And it’s another eye-popper in a world of dining where taste + science = WOW.
Don’t know your colloidal dispersions from your colloidal suspensions? Neither did we. But with so much chemistry and physics playing to applause at a restaurant near you, we decided to invite an expert to join us for dinner at Moto to decipher some of the science that’s showing up on plates around town.
Lee Marek has logged 30-plus years teaching science to high school students (Naperville), to college students (University of Illinois at Chicago) and to TV audiences (“The Late Show With David Letterman,” “Bozo’s Circus”). He loves to make ice cream using liquid nitrogen, quotes Albert Einstein and was fiddling around with Mentos in cola a half-dozen years ago.
You don’t need Marek sitting at your table–or a degree in advanced molecular gastronomy–to enjoy a meal at Moto. But, boy, can Marek make it interesting.
Visit the realm of Cantu–he’s the chef munching a “paper menu” on the cover of this month’s Gourmet magazine–and you encounter a serene dining room dressed in subdued colors. A floor below, the kitchen’s abuzz with chefs, wired to the hilt, working with huge Thermos-like containers called Dewar flasks and dehydrators and . . .
They are pulling together the night’s feast: Menus to eat. “Spaghetti” made from fruit. Graham cracker foam. “Nachos” for dessert, with dark chocolate starring in the role of crumbled ground beef.
“Moto is high-tech tapas. Food to fool your senses,” scientist Marek told us, a few days after a 10-course meal at Moto. “I felt right at home. One reason is the liquid nitrogen that is used in abundance at Moto. I love that stuff!
“Some restaurants brag about the number of bottles of wine in the cellar,” Marek added. “Here they are really proud of their supply of liquid nitrogen.”
You bet. And you can bet Cantu is having fun. He’s lovin’ the food, lovin’ the science, lovin’ pushing his kitchen’s boundaries and his team of 30 way beyond the predictable.
“If you do everything you’ve already done before, it’s not very fun,” he says in a phone chat later. “So in order to do something different, you’re going to have to get into design and science and all that good stuff.”
Which is why diners are challenged to think about what they eat and how it’s cooked–especially if you think of cooking as subjecting food to heat. Enter liquid nitrogen.
“If you’re going to have a bunch of gas burners, why not understand the exact opposite of cooking, which would be liquid nitrogen?” says Cantu. “It’s just a different type of energy.”
OK, Homaro, you’re losing us here. Lee? Help?
“Basically, nitrogen is something that hooks people in because it has a lot of visual appeal. And it’s very, very cold,” says Marek, of the colorless liquid that boils at around minus-320 degrees Fahrenheit.
“Because it is a liquid–but it’s at its boiling point–it looks just like water. It’s a colorless liquid. But it’s boiling.”
Sit down to dinner at Moto, as we did with Marek and his wife, Margaret, and soon edible menus, printed on a Parmesan-herb cracker this night, arrive.
After choosing our prix-fixe menu, servers emerge from behind curtains with the first course, salmon and sesame. A cloud envelops copper saucepans holding a sesame mixture, puzzling the scientist who admits, he is “confounded by the smoking sesame pellets.” His hypothesis: lots of liquid nitrogen. It’s an eyebrow-raiser ’round the table.
“We’re sort of recreating a maki roll,” Cantu says later, explaining the concept.
Another course arrives and we slurp up a yellow popcorn-flavored sauce sharing plate space with chunks of crab and passion fruit “spaghetti,” prompting a “cool!” from Marek.
Peas and Carrots–frozen tiny green and orange balls piled on a metal spoon–chill the mouth before their flavor kicks tastebuds. Marek calls it “interesting, scientifically” then launches into an explanation of how he thought they might be made: “My guess is they take one of those barrel pipettes. Now, picture that filled up with liquefied peas and carrots. And you just drop it, say, from a foot above into liquid nitrogen. … When it hits the liquid nitrogen, it turns into a sphere.”
He was on target about those Peas and Carrots. It’s one reason Moto’s chefs go through a 1,000-liter tank of liquid nitrogen in a week and a half and use 400 or so pipettes.
“I use those kinds of pipettes all the time for teaching science. We usually don’t have cole slaw in them,” Marek says, smiling as a course dubbed BBQ Pork With the Fixin’s arrives at the table, a long, tube-like plastic pipette containing cole slaw spearing a chunk of pork. “That’s kind of cool.”
We eat paper tasting like cotton candy and a white chocolate truffle that, when bitten, releases liquid cotton candy.
What gets the scientist smiling–and occasionally puzzled– is a series of “discrepant events.” They are, says Marek, “what we in the science educational field call a discrepant event is an event or idea that is counterintuitive or unexpected.
“Your eyes tell you one thing, but your taste tells you another. Your senses can be fooled,” he says.
“Discrepant events tend to grab people by perking their interest and setting the stage to induce–maybe seduce–the people into wanting to know why,” says Marek.
An example? Dessert nachos created by pastry chef Ben Roche. The menu says “kiwi, mango, mint and maize.” The dish looks like tortilla chips topped with salsa and crumbled ground beef. It’s sweet. The salsa’s made from kiwi. The ground beef is chocolate.
Or there’s that passion fruit spaghetti. “You bite into it and you go, `Oh, that’s cool. That’s a great flavor,'” Marek says, explaining how the noodle is a tasty example of an extrusion–a substance forced through something with very small holes.
It’s an openness to experimentation coupled with science that Harold McGee admires in the chefs dabbling in food chemistry these days.
“Some people will be way out there on the edge, trying bizarre things that will only appear on their menus once because it’s obvious to everybody that it’s not so nice, [while] other people will use it to really refine traditional dishes and make them modern in that sense,” says the West-Coast based author, whose 1984 volume, “On Food and Cooking: The Science and Lore of The Kitchen,” is something of a bible to experimental chefs. “They’ll still be grounded in an old idea but they’ll be a 21st Century version of that idea and everything in a way.”
Marek would probably agree on the creativity bubbling in scientists–and chefs. “Scientists like to study some effect that no one else has seen, or figure out how something works that no one else has figured out,” he says.
“The chef here [at Moto] looks at food from a different perspective and is able to do things with food because he’s prepared scientifically to do that,” says Marek. “That’s where creativity comes in.”
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A series of incredibly discrepant events*
What happens when a scientist–Lee Marek, a science teacher for 30-plus years in Naperville and who now teaches at University of Illinois at Chicago–walks into Moto, where chef Homaro Cantu and his crew are hooked on liquid N(2).
THE DISH: Salmon and Sesame
WHAT HAPPENS: At the table, a cloud of “smoke” surrounds a dish of salmon and sesame crumbles.
THE PROCESS: A colloidal dispersion of water droplets
THE SCIENTIST EXPLAINS: The cloud around the sesame crumbles is not smoke. If you take something–in this case, the sesame mixture–“out of liquid nitrogen, it will cause water vapor in the air to condense, much like the water vapor in your breath on a cold day,” Marek says. “Only liquid nitrogen is really cold! About minus 320 degrees Fahrenheit. So it is not ‘smoke’ in the true sense but more like a cloud of water droplets.”
THE DISH: Peas and Carrots
WHAT HAPPENS: Frozen bits of pea and carrot purees sparked with ginger are dropped in liquid nitrogen.
THE PROCESS: Exothermic process
THE SCIENTIST EXPLAINS: To get these liquids into solids, “the pea and carrot slurry underwent a change of state,” Marek says. “Energy was transferred from the slurry to the nitrogen. In the process, the slurry went into the solid state–it froze.”
THE DISH: BBQ Bork With the Fixin’s
WHAT HAPPENS: A chunk of pork cheek in barbecue sauce is offset by a charcoal briquette (a squid-ink blackened cube of bread) that becomes white as it “burns” at the table.
THE PROCESS: Deposition
THE SCIENTIST EXPLAINS: The briquette is frozen– yet it looks like it’s burning. “The briquette is very cold,” Marek says. “Water vapor in the air condenses on it and freezes–creating frost. That is, the water goes directly from a gas to a solid.”
*A discrepant event: “An event or idea that is counterintuitive or unexpected and that seems to run contrary to one’s first line of reasoning,” Marek says.
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Weird science on the menu
Here are a few places to enjoy a serving of science–an emulsion or edible paper, perhaps?–with your dinner. Can’t get to the restaurant? Check out the photos on their Web sites.
Alinea, 1723 N. Halsted St., 312-867-0110. There are two menus: tasting (12 courses, $125) and tour (24 courses, $175). www.alinea-restaurant.com
Avenues, The Peninsula Chicago, 108 E. Superior St., 312-573-6754. There is a 3-course menu ($90), a 5-course menu ($120) and a 10-course Chef’s Palate menu ($145; with wines, add $115). A la carte is also available. www.chicago.peninsula.com
Charlie Trotter’s, 816 W. Armitage Ave., 773-248-6228. A grand menu (7 courses, $145), a vegetable menu (7 courses, $115), a kitchen table menu ($200) or private dining are available. www.charlietrotters.com
Moto, 945 W. Fulton Market, 312-491-0058. The restaurant offers a 5-course menu ($65), a 10-course menu ($105) and a 16-course GTM (Grand Tour of Moto) menu ($160). www.motorestaurant.com
Tru, 676 N. St. Clair St., 312-202-0001. There’s a 3-course menu ($90), market menu ($135) and a seasonal menu ($100). There is also a dessert collection ($35) and an a la carte lounge menu. www.trurestaurant.com
–J.H.
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jhevrdejs@tribune.com
