 "Photo: Eliot Meyer")
Egil Valentine calls his job creative catering.
As the executive chef of his catering company, Macondo, Valentine's creative use of food requires ingredients and equipment that might look more at home in a laboratory than in a kitchen. Valentine demonstrated for me some techniques used by the modern chef that are somewhat flippantly referred to as molecular gastronomy.
Valentine was fully prepped to begin his demonstration when I arrived at his house, but he started by giving me a crash course in molecular gastronomy.
"Molecular gastronomy is techno-cooking. If you think of mango, you think of mango, but a chef like me thinks mango in seven different forms: a gel, a foam, a powder - you understand?" the chef asked.
Valentine continued, as I imagined mango foam.
"Molecular gastronomy is deconstruction. You play with the rules. You play with texture, but flavor is the key - I mean it needs to taste good," he said. "That's a danger in molecular gastronomy. Some people use the techniques of molecular gastronomy, and then the mango tastes weird or doesn't taste like mango anymore, or it tastes like mango with an accent of something weird. Then the food becomes confusion."
Valentine's kitchen is not large, but cooking equipment is everywhere.
"Those are the chemicals I use in my laboratory," he said, pointing to an array of plastic bottles. Sodium alginate, Versa Whip 600, gellan, maltodextrin, calcium chloride, lecithin, methyl cellulose and Activa RM covered one corner of the counter top.
Valentine uses these contents to make his emulsions, foams and gels. Some stabilize foams for hours while others dissolve only in cold water and form a gel when heated. Though Valentine was not experimenting with any of these chemicals during his explanation, he did make a cocktail with grapefruit juice and basil. I sat outside picking fresh basil out of my teeth, but it was tasty, really. He continued to explain the history of molecular gastronomy.
"If you think about it, molecular gastronomy has been going on since Brillat-Savarin. What do you think people thought about making hollandaise? What is that? They found out you take lecithin from the egg yolks and you can emulsify something and make it into a creamy consistency - from eggs! People probably were tripping!"
Quickly transitioning from Brillat-Savarin - the 18th-century gourmand whom Valentine credits with the beginnings of molecular gastronomy - my lesson turned to the modern masters.
I was starting to wonder what would happen if we emulsified that mango gel in egg yolks, but before I could proffer my idea, the lesson continued.
Molecular gastronomy, a combination of physical reactions and chemical reactions, Valentine said, has been around for a long time. Valentine added that the cooking method is just now becoming popular. In the mid-1980s, Ferrán Adriá started mixing fast food influences and techniques and making them into a modern concept. As a physicist, Adriá understood composition, chemistry and how things react.
After the mid-'80s came people such as Pierre Gagnaire, Wylie Dufresne and Heston Blumenthal, and the concept has since grown.
"The main thing you have to remember is, when you talk about molecular gastronomy, you are playing with texture," Valentine said. "You are playing with deconstruction, you are altering the natural composition of things."
Following the molecular gastronomy cram session, Valentine took me into the kitchen where his wife, Amy Osborn, helped the creative caterer get ready. Osborn is the other half of their catering business - the pastry chef and Valentine's muse, he said.
"I like the sense of surprise," Valentine said. "I like to enhance things. I like to keep things so you can taste them in the natural way, but with a twist that brings surprise, so you say, 'Oh my god!' Like, 'Is that chicken or is that sushi?' as you will see tonight. I made this puffy rice. It's going to be crusted on a cylinder of chicken and sliced to give the impression that it is sushi."
From the refrigerator, Valentine removed a chicken breast that had been reshaped into the perfect cylinder about an inch in diameter and 5 inches long.
"We use transglutaminase to bond the chicken together, then roll it up and tie it and cook it with the recirculator," he said.
Transglutaminase is meat glue, which bonds the proteins together. It is used in the fast food industry to make nuggets, sticks or chunks. Valentine used it to create the roll, which is then cooked with the recirculator.
And it's the recirculator that takes Valentine's kitchen into the realm of a mad scientist's laboratory. The electronic box has burette clamps to attach to a stand and has tubes coming out of it. Valentine attached the clamps to the edge of a pot filled with water, into which the recirculating tubes were dipped. The knobs on the electronic box control the water temperature to within a tenth of a degree.
With the flip of a switch, the recirculator pumps water through its innards and makes sure that every drop pumped is exactly 156.2 degrees. Oh hell, let's turn it up to 156.3. This would never be found on the shelves of Williams-Sonoma.
Valentine then measured out some of his collection of powders on a scale. I can see that Versa Whip is thrown in, but the exact proportions are closely guarded secrets of the trade. A cranberry-basil reduction, along with the powders, were placed into the stainless steel bowl of the stand mixer. A cranberry foam was whipped up before Valentine pulled the next component from the refrigerator.
"These are sweet potatoes, fingerling Peruvian potatoes and wild mushrooms," he said.
As the potatoes warmed in the oven, he and Osborn started making foam cylinders with pastry-chef gear - the same foam used for piping cookies or cream puffs, Osborn said.
Once satisfied for achieving the perfect foam cylinder, the two started plating the meal. Valentine drew a bright green loop on a square, white plate with parsley oil. He then sliced the chicken roll into half-inch sections that he rolled in puffed rice.
"To make the puffed rice, you cook the rice, and then you dehydrate it," Valentine said. "You can dehydrate in an oven, but the dehydrator is more precise."
The chicken roll, covered in puffed rice, looked like sushi. The bright green parsley oil made an appealing visual base and the cylinder of cranberry foam was like nothing I had ever seen on a plate: slightly pink and, well, foamy. The purple potatoes made the color scheme complete.
"I don't like to go too far with molecular gastronomy, because, in the end, it can be too much. In the end, it's food. You are not going to get full from air. You want to feel satisfaction," Valentine said. "There is fine line where it stops becoming food and starts becoming art or entertainment. It's an experience, entertainment, like, 'Oh my God! How does he make this?'"
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