After years of serving as your faithful companion to ball games and keeping the brewskies frosty at backyard barbecues, your trusty beer cooler now has a new assignment–cooking up a gourmet meal, sous-vide style.
For those of you who don’t keep up with high-tech cookery, sous-vide is a method of cooking where food is heated for an extended period at relatively low temperatures. Unlike a slow cooker or Crock pot, the sous-vide process uses airtight plastic bags placed in hot water well below boiling point (usually around 140 Fahrenheit). The idea is to maintain the integrity and flavor of the food without overcooking it (but while still killing any bacteria that may be present).
Normally, a sous-vide cooker like the Sous-Vide Supreme would set you back hundreds of dollars, but chef J. Kenzi Lopez-Alt shows us how to use a beer cooler to cook a perfect piece of meat.
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French chef Pierre Gagnaire served up the world’s first “synthetic gourmet dish” in a restaurant in Hong Kong’s Mandarin Oriental hotel today. The meal began with an apple-lemon flavored appetizer—jelly balls made of a “combination of ascorbic acid, glucose, citric acid and a few grams of 4-O-a-glucopyranosyl-D-sorbitol, a sugar substitute otherwise known as maltitol.” The main dish, lobster fricassee, surely sounds yummy—the chef even described the entrée as “smooth, crusty and frosty.” But the ingredients resemble a laundry list of chemicals you’re likely to find with a “Mr. Yuck” sticker. To top it off, the “lobster” was flavored in a special sauce made from tartaric acid, glucose, and polyphenols.
For months, Gagnaire worked with the French chemist Harvé This—the co-founder of molecular gastronomy—to concoct this allegedly tasty, unnatural meal from scratch. Chemist-turned-chef This sees the potential for this new way of creating and cooking vegetable substitutes molecule-by-molecule as a way to end world hunger. Instead of buying veggies from the grocery store, chefs could instead mix together caroteniods, pectins, fructose, and glucuronic acid to whip up a carrot (esque) dish.
The idea is solid, but what about the nutritional value of vegetables your mom probably nagged about?
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Last month, we reported that female dolphins had learned to use sponges to catch their prey. And now, it turns out that not only do dolphins use tools, but they also have a recipe for calamari.
Australian researchers have observed a female bottlenose dolphin using her snout to prepare a meal of cuttlefish. But instead of just gobbling up the fish, the dolphin carefully extracted its bones before dining—a display of chef-like skills that is extraordinary among marine mammals.
The feast took place in South Australia’s Upper Spencer Gulf, where cuttlefish breed. The researchers had first filmed this amazing culinary-enabled dolphin off the coast of South Australia in 2003, where they saw her preparing four different cuttlefish. They were able to identify her in 2007 by her scars (apparently the circular scars on her head were unique enough to identify her four years later). They recorded her meals with a Sony HD Cam video camera, and later used the footage to analyze her foraging behavior. The results were finally published in PLoS One in January of this year.
In case you wanted to know, here’s her recipe for cuttlefish:
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