Category Archives: AntiGriddle
Techniques: Flash-Freeze on Anti-Griddle with iSi Thermo Whip
Claudio Urru, Chef de Cuisine at Restaurant “Top Air” in Stuttgart, Germany is using the iSi Thermo Whip Plus to flash-freeze red Oxalis Parfait on the Anti-Griddle.
Ideas from the PolyScience booth at StarChefs
Of course we like to have some fun during an event like this! Shows like StarChefs are the perfect moment to play with our own culinary technology, try out things that we haven’t done yet or come up with new ideas. Most time it happens when curious chefs walk up to us and say ask: “What happens if…?” We then mostly say: “Let’s try it out right now and see!”
So here is a quick write up of the many crazy or interesting ideas that stuck with us. Some are just silly, but we were curious to see what would happen. Others are very relevant and some may actually be realized with some refining.
Rapid Ageing: The Sonicprep makes it possible to substitute traditional wood-barrel aging by infusing liquids with barrel wood chips. So far good results have been produced with sauces (fish sauce, soy sauce, and Worcestershire sauce) or Calvados, cider or wines. Pretty out there is the idea of barrel aging the Modernist Cuisine Rare Beef Jus using the SonicPrep.
Infusion of fresh herbs into finished soup: Instead of cooking herbs with the soup, simply use ultrasonic sound waves to infuse the aroma before serving to impart cleaner and brighter uncooked flavors.
Liquor Infusion: We showed how to infuse vodka with citrus peels in 90 seconds. The potential to infuse on-demand or larger batches as mise en place very quickly seems to be quite appealing to many mixologists and chefs. To produce a great mint flavor in a mojito, we infused fresh mint into rum before continuing with the traditional method. The Sonicprep would not work for mixing the lime into the cocktail. Using Fresh Origins edible micro flowers for infusion didn’t result in a pleasant flavor.
Hybrid Creams: As part of their pre-StarChef’s ICC workshop research, Alex and Aki created a watermelon/bacon fat creme that they used to cook halibut sous vide in. Alvin Schultz brought up the idea of playing with new versions of “gravy” by homogenizing chicken jus and rendered chicken or making the Modernist Cuisine liquid Caprese (tomato water, and mozzarella cream).
Hydrocolloid Emulsions: This is still an open question: What happens when blending Olive Oil and Gelatin solution to potentially yield a simple olive oil gummy?
Ultrasonic French Fries: Another open experiment: Sonicate cut potato in water, then fry. How would these compare to the Modernist Cuisine fries and cryo-blanched fries.
Degassing beverages: We know already that wine benefits from degassing with the Sonicprep. This time we tried beer. The result wasn’t anything that makes us want to repeat it. But tap water actually was surprisingly more smooth. Throwing in a couple wood chips made it even sweeter. At the end it may have been able to compete with some bottled water brands. One could also call it “cold prepared wood tea”.
Separating apple cider into clear cider and apple butter: We used fresh cider, so no alcohol in there, otherwise the clear apple cider would be your typical Calvados. However, the remaining solids turned out as an incredibly intense “apple butter”. Since we vacuum boiled it and the apples were not exposed to high heat, all the wonderful aromas still were there. The aroma comparison of the clear cider vs the solids was also very interesting. The clear cider had a green, fresh apple aroma. The “apple butter” was more like a sweet roll, almost cinnamon-infused aroma. (According to the ingredients list of the cider jug, no spices were added)
low temp separation of clear apple cider (left) and a powerful "apple butter" (right)
Beer Whiskey: Putting a bottle of Hennepin Beer through the rotovap process was interesting. The feedback was between “terrible” and “interesting”. We also wondered what would happen if we re-carbonated it in an iSi siphon and chilled it in a Refrigerated Circulating Bath for a very hoppy, high proof beer…
Infusing vodka with orange citrus peel and lavender
Separating Habanero aroma from Capsaicin: This has been done successfully many times, but most people still haven’t had the chance yet to taste it. It’s pretty amazing to taste how aromatic Habanero is once you remove the active component that is responsible for the heat.
“Super Chiller” or Refrigerated Circulating Bath Bath
Aging fish at 0C: Something we’ll be looking into is the idea of using the Refrigerated Circulating Bath to hold fish at precisely 0°C to allow for ageing as described in Sunday’s main stage demo by Bjorn Frantzen and Daniel Lindenberg.
The Aviary Old Fashioned in the Rocks: Still one of the most creative applications for a Refrigerated Circulating Bath has been developed by the Aviary team. As this video shows, the goal is to produce an ice shell that holds a cocktail and is then cracked open by the drinker. To freeze the shell, fill a balloon with water and freeze the shell in a alcohol/water mix at -10C, drill a hole to drain the remaining liquid and replace the void with a cocktail.
Programmable Cook-Chill with remote iPhone control: We demonstrated how the new PolyScience Programmable Refrigerated Circulating Bath can be programmed for automated cook-chill processes with remote control and monitoring via our iPhone application. Temperature data is logged into Excel by simply putting a USB flash drive into the back of the unit. For a set up to acommodate larger batches of cook-chill, we recommend the Sous Vide Table by Randell.
Circulating duck fat: a number of people asked if it is possible to circulate duck fat and how they would clean the unit afterwards. Yes, the Sous Vide Professional is capable of circulating butter, duck fat or other liquids. However, if your application doesn’t require a whole tank full of duck fat, you can also simply use small hotel pans filled with the desired liquid and set it into the precisely controlled circulated bath (This can also provide the benefits of Sous Vide cooking without involving a vacuum sealer and local health department requirements that go with that). To clean the unit, simply run it in a vinegar, water, and non-foaming dish detergent mix.
Producing and holding warm cocktail foams, Olive Oil Chantilly and egg-yolk based sauces:
The new Whip Canister Holder - 1 fits all size canisters! No floating canisters. No abuse to the lever.
Infusions of botanicals into alcohol or syrups in sous vide bath: Something we hear from more and more chefs/pastry chefs is that they use the Sous Vide Professional for
Infusion of flavors and aromas into custard. This isn’t anything new in terms of flavor, but it is a time saver. We poured a traditional Crème Anglaise mix into the vacuum bag, added a couple twigs of lavender, sealed it, and cooked it for 20 min at 179F. Afterwards we massaged the bag to distribute the lavender… the crème had just the right hint of lavender.
Flavored snow: this is something that sounds good in theory, but may not work. Philip came up with the idea putting a larger cover on the Anti-Griddle (Cambro tank size) and humidifying it with a flavored liquid (perhaps rotovap’ed orange) to create a flavored “snow”. It wouldn’t take long to produce some snow. So, we’ll try it out soon.
Holding frozen delicate foods during service: One chef mentioned the he uses the Anti-Griddle at the garde manger station during busy times to prepare and hold finely grated frozen smoked salmon. Interesting…
Saffron Smoked Chocolate Mousse: This is a cool idea we came up with in discussions during the show but did not try yet. Fill iSi whipper with a chocolate mousse base, set up The Smoking Gun with 2 pinches of dried saffron, and inject saffron smoke into the canister. Then charge the canister with gas and foam the chocolate mousse infused with smoke aroma.
Catching up in the booth: Jeffrey Steingarten, Philip Preston, Nastassia Lopez, Dave Arnold, Johnny Iuzzini, Alvin Schultz and Joe Strybel
A special thank you goes out to Arielle Johnson and Alvin Schultz, our volunteer helpers we had this year in our booth!
Anti-Griddle Potato Blini,Trout Caviar & Bittersweet Chocolate
Ingredients for the 1 L iSi Gourmet Whip:
150 g Potato purée
3 Egg whites (approx. 75 g)
50 ml Sour cream
Salt
Pepper
To garnish:
50 g Trout caviar
50 g Bittersweet chocolate 70 % cocoa
Preparation:
Whisk 100 g of cooked, strained potatoes with 250 g butter and 250 ml of warm milk with an egg beater; add a pinch of salt and nutmeg. Room temperature – strain the warm potato purée and egg whites through the iSi sieve pour into the 1 L iSi Gourmet Whip using the funnel. Then screw on 2 iSi cream chargers and shake vigorously. Allow to cool for 3 hours.
Mix the sour cream and season with salt and pepper.
Grate the bittersweet chocolate into dust using the fine micro-plain and freeze.
Place 8 blini – the potato/egg white mixture – (approx. 3 cm in diameter) on to the Anti-Griddle and let freeze, turn and freeze on the other side.
The blini should still be somewhat creamy in the middle.
Serving suggestion:
Place 2 blini on a plate, put the caviar in a spoon with a dab of sour cream on top and dust with the bittersweet chocolate. Garnish with starflowers.
Recipe from Heinz Hanner, Restaurant Hanner, www.hanner.cc
From Philip Preston’s lab…
By Lisa Shames – Chicago SUN-TIMES
From Philip Preston’s lab to the kitchens of boundary-pushing chefs
It’s rare that when someone describes meat as “melt-in-your-mouth,” it actually does. But the turkey I ate a few Sundays back came pretty close. Same for the flank steak and short ribs, cuts not typically known for their tenderness. For dessert, there were made-on-the-fly frozen creme anglaise lollipops with just-picked rosemary sprigs stepping in for the sticks.
Philip Preston, the creator of this delicious afternoon “snack” as he referred to it, is not a chef. But he does test recipes and he spends so much time in restaurant kitchens that culinary trendsetters, including Grant Achatz, Thomas Keller and Wylie Dufresne, have him on speed dial.
Preston is, among many other things (more on those later), president of Niles-based PolyScience, a company that creates and supplies the country’s most innovative restaurants with high-tech equipment, some of which were used to create the meal I ate and the reason why I was at his Winnetka home.
I first met Preston six years ago when I stumbled upon his tiny booth at the National Restaurant Association show in Chicago. I was hooked immediately, not only by his cool gadgets but also his passion and gee-whiz attitude.
Each year since, I’ve stopped by his booth, which has grown steadily in size and range of equipment.
“Everything about the preparation of food involves science,” he told me at our first meeting. “Even the Italian grandmother who’s been creating wonderful meals has been practicing science, perhaps without even knowing it.”
Chefs came calling
Preston and PolyScience haven’t always been so interested in what goes on in restaurant kitchens. Founded in 1963, the company was originally an importer of German laboratory equipment.
In the early ’70s, PolyScience started manufacturing its own temperature-control equipment, which is used to help create liquid products ranging from motor oil to paint and also is used in DNA labs. (PolyScience built the unit that tested O.J. Simpson’s glove.)
“Temperature control is touching you everywhere,” Preston says.
That’s probably where the company would have stayed if it hadn’t been for a phone call eight years ago from Matthias Merges, then the chef de cuisine at Charlie Trotter’s. The Lincoln Park restaurant was interested in using their immersion circulators for sous vide cooking, a gentle, low-temperature technique in which vacuum-sealed ingredients are cooked slowly in water.
“It all started with Charlie Trotter,” says Preston.
Following Trotter was New York chef Dufresne of wd-50, who was in need of sous vide equipment for an upcoming “Iron Chef” episode.
“He had some beat-up circulators that he bought on eBay but was embarrassed to put those on TV,” Preston recalls.
He got a good chuckle when Dufresne told him that when he first contacted one of PolyScience’s competitors about using their lab equipment, the puzzled regional manager’s response was, “Yeah, we sold one of our units to some laundry in Northern California that’s going to use it to cook with, too.”
An avid home cook, Preston knew right away that the “laundry” was actually one of the country’s best restaurants, the French Laundry, owned by Keller.
Next up: Achatz and business partner Nick Kokonas. They weren’t only interested in PolyScience’s sous vide equipment for their soon-to-open Chicago restaurant Alinea, but had other ideas up their sleeves.
Taking a concept from Achatz, Preston created the Anti-Griddle, a cooktop with a minus-30-degree surface that can be used to quickly freeze anything, including the aforementioned creme anglaise lollipops.
Achatz and Preston have since collaborated on other pieces, including a low-temperature bath used to make the egg-shaped ice cube in the much-talked-about Old Fashioned cocktail at the Aviary, Achatz’s new bar.
Garage workshop
While Preston often works with chefs in their restaurant kitchens — he recently came back from the French Laundry, where he brainstormed with Keller on ways to make sous vide more approachable — it’s in his home garage where the majority of experimenting takes place.
“I can’t learn things from reading,” he says. “I have to learn things by doing.” (Preston may have the James Bond theme song ringtone on his cell phone because it’s “fun,” but I can’t help think of the film’s gadget-creating character Q.)
Even before entering his workshop, or “Garage Mahal” as Preston has dubbed it, it’s clear he’s a man of many interests.
In the lush backyard, steps away from the open fire pit and Big Green Egg barbecue, there’s an expansive, well-manicured vegetable and herb garden. Not far away is a mini-orchard of apple, peach, pear and plum trees. And next to that, the chicken coop he rigged himself.
Preston also did the initial design of the 4,000-square-foot house he shares with his wife and three children.
In the immaculately kept garage, there is a 1965 Dodge Coronet convertible, a ’65 Cadillac Eldorado convertible, a ’65 Corvette roaster and four Norton motorcycles, all painstakingly restored by Preston. The five years he spent on a car racing pit crew clearly comes in handy.
On the walls are various cartoon cells, one of Preston’s many collections, which also include vintage slot machines and pool tables.
Preston keeps the kitchen equipment he’s tinkering with in the back of the garage. There’s a still-in-the-works contraption that he hopes one day will make edible snow. He did manage to make one bowl of strawberry-flavored snow that he and his wife shared.
The Sonicprep, one of his newest pieces — think of it as a stick blender on steroids, says Preston — emulsifies liquids using sound waves. It will retail for $4,000.
The 3-year-old Rotary Vacuum Evaporator, inspired by a similar piece of equipment he heard about in Spain, is a low-temperature distillation unit that Alinea has used to extract herb aromas like basil.
The Smoking Gun is a handheld contraption that adds smoky aromas to food without heat. Preston originally made 50 of them and gave them to chefs, including Dufresne, to play around with. He’s since sold 20,000 of the $100 gizmos.
“I originally thought I was just making something cool for a couple of friends,” he says.
Also in the garage are a few of his Sous Vide Professional units (the unit, which can fit into a drawer, is available at Williams- Sonoma for $800), in which our lunch has been cooking slowly at 160 degrees for the last 24 hours.
Trial and error
Preston credits his appreciation for cooking to his Belgian mother and the two-year French culinary course he took in his 20s.
But while he knows his way around a kitchen, learning to cook sous vide was a trial-and-error process.
“I’d find you can’t work with chefs and have them tell you everything about a technique unless you do it yourself,” he says. “So I just started to cook stuff.”
His first dish, lamb shank, was a disaster — an inedible, excessively gamey thyme bomb of a lamb shank.
“Sous vide can really accentuate flavors, and lamb shank can have a gamey characteristic,” says Preston.
He also didn’t realize that you need only use 20 percent of the herbs and spices you normally would since everything cooks together under seal.
His second attempt? “Rubber chicken,” he says.
But with guidance from chefs like Merges and Achatz, Preston hit his stride. For curious cooks, there is now a PolyScience channel on YouTube loaded with how-to videos that were shot in Preston’s home kitchen.
Before sitting down to our meal, we head back to that kitchen, where Preston seasons the sous-vide turkey legs, short ribs and flank steak with a subtle truffle salt and then sears them in duck fat in a cast iron skillet to create a nice, crusty exterior. He often takes this “hybrid approach” when cooking.
“I don’t use every tool all the time, but I like having all of them,” he says. “I get the best of both worlds.”
Chefs continue to inspire him.
“It’s almost as if I tee up the ball for them and let their creativity take the swing,” he says. “A lot of times I can throw a couple of things out there, and then their creativity takes it to a level I would have never imagined.”
Lisa Shames is the food/dining editor of Chicago Social magazine.
