Modernist Cuisine

For my birthday, my brother and sister in law (thanks Andrew and Kaite!) got me a modernist cuisine cooking class where I get to learn how to do newfangled methods of cooking like you’d find in some of the fanciest restaurants.

Simply put, this was amazing; we were in this lady’s garage as she showed us all these techniques and let us do the bulk of the prep. By “us” I mean, the ~8 people who were taking the course. We each got to do a little here and there, passing things off as we switched to new things. At the end of it, we sat down and had a meal with all the things we made.

Pretty decent prep station, though kinda packed for 9 people

The menu we prepped is as follows:

• Sous vide carrot with beet noodles
• Lime cilantro cubes
• Apple ginger paper
• Feta-brined cauliflower stem
• Parmesan cauliflower foam
• Compressed shiso watermelon
• Sous vide steak
• Sous vide pork belly

I don’t pretend to understand a lot of the prep steps; we were basically just doing what Muffy told us to do. She did give us some explanation as to the why we were doing things, and I retained a few of them. Here’s some pics and a bit of explanation:

The carrots were cooked in a sous vide with juiced carrots, bringing more carrot per carrot, then the beets were turned into a kind of jello in tubes which produced the noodles

These are beet drops using the remainder of the gelled beet noodles for the carrots

This was one of the more straightforward preps; just blend together lime and cilantro and make a gelatin from it

After it solidifies, you can make cubes and serve them with stuff

This was either steak or pork belly which we’d cooked in the sous vide, just adding some char to it

I didn’t get a really good picture of the other stuff because, again, we were doing most of the work. The vacuum sealer was definitely a big star though; it infuses liquid into things really quickly, which is what we did with the watermelon and cauliflower. However, my favorite was the parmesan foam; it was just so good on the steak and is relatively easy to accomplish.

We actually got quite a bit of food from the prep we’d done, and it all tasted… well most of it tasted great. There were hits and misses with everyone, but the fun here wasn’t the food itself, it was making it.

So now, of course, I want to make a bunch of this stuff. Good luck to me to convince Shanin to let me get this stuff!

Any rate, see you next time!