Cooking 2.0

In recent weeks I've become quite interested in what I think of as Cooking 2.0, but which the rest of the planet calls Molecular Gastronomy. In case you haven't stumbled across this, it's a method for high-profile chefs to make vast sums of money by serving miniscule portions of chemically-engineered food at staggeringly high prices.

The preparation of food, of course, has always been about chemistry, but most chefs are happy to just follow recipes without really knowing what processes are going on. The new generation of Cooking 2.0 chefs (Ferran Adriá at El Bulli near Barcelona, Grant Achatz at Alinea in Chicago, Heston Blumenthal at The Fat Duck in the UK and many others), use many techniques that are more at home in a laboratory setting to create astonishing gastronomic experiences. I haven't actually sampled any of these delights, I'm not made of money, and El Bulli only opens for six months of the year and reservations sell out on the first day of each season. So I guess I'll have to try making these things myself.

This all started, by the way, when I was trying to solve a couple of problems with my pies. One problem was how to stop pastry sticking to aluminium foil trays - butter works well, but has to be applied very carefully; oil is more hit and miss. I wanted something I could spray into the trays (you can get something called PAM in the States, but I've never seen it here), and the answer was this amazing substance called lecithin, about which, more later.

The other problem was to do with the jelly in my pork pies. Previously, I've made up small batches of the jelly by boiling pig or sheep feet in a savoury stock. The feet contain lots of gelatin, which sets the jelly at room temperature. But I decided it was too much hassle to make up fresh jelly for each batch of pies, so I made a bucketful and froze it in small containers. Somewhere between freezing and thawing, the jelly lost its set-ability, so I had a few customers whose pork pies dribbled on them when they bit into them. Not good. I did some online research, and found that yes, gelatin is broken down at a particular temperature, and loses the ability to set. This led me to explore the use of gelatin sheets combined with a super-intense stock, and the results are pretty marvellous. I also came across lots of Cooking 2.0 applications for gelatin, which I'll tell you about when I've had a chance to mess about with them.

Back to lecithin. This remarkable substance has the ability to make things like oil and water stick together when their natural inclination is to be apart. In other words, it's an emulsifier. It occurs naturally in eggs, which is why mayonaisse works. If you look at food labels, you'll find it in everything from chocolate to bread, and I've no doubt that brewers of horrible beer in the UK use it to make the foamy head last longer. In facts foams and 'airs' form a large part of the Cooking 2.0 repertoire: you can whizz any liquid (sweet, savoury, whatever) into foam, and if there's a bit of lecithin dissolved in it, the foam bubbles last for a very long time, rather than bursting after a few seconds.

I bought half a kilo of Soya Lecithin - it's also sold as a food supplement that is supposed to lower blood pressure and cholesterol, and have been having quite a lot of fun with it.

Next on my culinary adventure, I want to get hold of some Sodium Alginate, Calcium Chloride and Xanthan Gum. I tried the local pharmacy this morning and they've given me the address of a company in central Madrid who supply all kinds of exotic chemicals for all kinds of industries - I'm going there this evening, so I'll let you know how I get on. The first two of those chemicals, by the way, are used in 'sphericisation' - this is a method of encasing an intensely flavoured liquid into a neutral-tasting gel shell. When you bite into the shell, the taste explodes in your mouth. Depending on the size of your droplets, the spheres can resemble caviare or olives.

And finally, another technique I stumbled across: sous vide cooking (French for 'under vacuum'). I've tried many techniques for getting really tender meat and fish, none of them entirely successful, but this one looks promising. Basically what you do is you stick your seasoned meat or fish (or vegetables) into a plastic bag, suck the air out of it and then seal it. Then you place it in a container of water at a specific temperature (always much less than boiling) and wait for the specified number of hours. There are devices available that will maintain the water at the specified temperature more or less forever, but they are not cheap. However, I came across The Beer Cooler Hack, and I'm using it right now to cook a breast of duck. As far as vacuum-wrapping the meat goes, you can buy machines to do this, or you can buy your meat already packed this way (but then you can't add any seasoning), or you can improvise with a zip-lock freezer bag and a drinking straw. As it happens, I have a roll of polythene tubing and a heat-sealing machine that I use for packaging my pies, so I cut a length of tube, sealed one end, put the seasoned duck in, sealed the other end, cut a small slit to insert a straw and suck the air out, and then sealed over the slit. Fingers crossed!

And the final weapon in the Cooking 2.0 arsenal: liquid nitrogen for instantly freezing stuff. I think I'll be giving that one a miss!

UPDATE: I found the mystery ingredients shop: they were just pulling the shutters across - closing an hour early because their computer was down. But the guy took a look at my list and confirmed they had all the things on it (woohoo!).

Awayday

We went to San Sebastian de los Reyes today. If you've ever been there, you'll be wondering why. It doesn't seem to have any historical interest, and not even the most optimistic town councillor would describe it as pretty. It's a kind of newish dormitory town to the north of Madrid. The reasons for the visit were twofold:

1) To check out a shop selling British products there

and

2) It's time for the annual IKEA trip.

When we emerged from the Metro at Hospital Infanta Sofia, we had an incredible sense of deja vu: the last time we went to a place like this was when we went to the IKEA at Las Suertes to the south of Madrid. Identical Metro station design, a view of motorways, mountains and general back-of-beyondness, and then wide boulevards flanked by 7-storey brick-clad apartment buildings and plenty of empty plots of land. All a bit desolate and weird.

Item one is called The Food Hall, and basically I wanted to see if it was worth trying to sell my pies to them. We came away with a selection of loot - a Wright's (of Crewe) Steak & Kidney pie for research purposes (yes it was as nasty as you'd expect for a pie that was made in England, frozen, shipped to Spain and ultimately sold for a bit over 2 Euros), a couple of Scotch Pies (pretty good, actually), 3 bottles of beer (Old Speckled Hen & Black Sheep), a bar of Cadbury's chocolate, some oatcakes (I don't know - the missus chose them) and some dried cranberries. 

Item two; when looking at the location of The Food Hall, I noticed there's an IKEA 'nearby'. So we had a spot of lunch, and set off walking in search of the big blue box. We found it after about 20 minutes, or rather, we found its backside, the bit where people pick up big bits of furniture. It was another 10 minutes' walk to get to the front door. And then the usual half-hour trek to go through the store and get to the checkouts. And the reason for going? In previous years, I've always bought these slippers they sell for mooching around the house in. They're very cheap, always come in bright colours, and only last for one winter. So I need some new ones, but was rather narked that I couldn't find them.

So we went to the 'nearby' Carrefour hypermarket - we were in some kind of 'retail park' - lots of big box stores around a gazillion-hectare car park. Again, miles and miles of walking. I did get some slippers, and some vino, and some turkey breast (gonna make some turkey & cranberry pies). And then we staggered, exhausted, up the hill to the Metro station.

A Strange Thing

Some time ago, my MacBook decided it couldn't connect to the WiFi router two metres away. My old PC laptop can connect to it, and so can my phone and MamaDuck's netbook and laptop. Not having a WiFi connection didn't bother me too much, apart from the blue cable crawling across the floor, until yesterday when I was in a Skype call with Offspring and wanted to show him something in the kitchen. This required every cable to be disconnected from the MacBook, and so of course we lost the connection.

Anyhoo, I just searched Google for the solution to the problem, and it's so utterly unlikely that I just had to share it with you. Are you ready? Perched eagerly on the edge of your seat? Okay, you have to reset Safari.

'Do what?'

'Reset Safari. That's all. It does the job.'

Apparently, what happens is, well, I can't really explain what happens, but it's something to do with Safari wanting to go through all the bookmarks and stuff in its cache to... no, sorry, doesn't make any sense at all.

So when you reset Safari, it deletes all the history and remembered stuff, and that then enables your WiFi to work. I hate to say this, because I adore my MacBook, and love the way the hardware and OS are integrated, but this Safari thing (Safari is the web browser written by Apple) is complete and utter crap. I don't even use Safari except for testing websites occasionally, and it quite happily went ahead and busted my MacBook.

Dubai Rental Property

Dubai Rental Property have been comment spamming this blog and my Dubai blog, neither of which are about property rental, at least in Dubai. I asked them to desist yesterday, and in response they left me five fresh comments. I know that off-site links from other blogs and websites are good for search engine rankings, but this is going too far. I will be watching the results for Dubai Furnished Property quite closely over the next few days, and also reporting the company to Google if they persist in their extremely irritating action. Foolishly, they publish a mobile, landline and fax number on their website. It may become necessary to make a few phone calls.

How To Make Your Wife Give You One Million Brownie Points

Do the ironing. All of it. Without being asked to.

How To Make Your Wife Giggle Uncontrollably

There are several ways of doing this, but here's a new one I discovered yesterday.

1) Go shopping, a few hours earlier than usual.

2) Notice that the professional kitchenware shop that is nearly always closed, and whose windows you normally gaze longingly into, is actually open.

3) Spend half an hour lusting after all the bits of kit you want, but only buy a slightly exotic Cook's Hat.

4) Do the rest of the shopping.

5) Rush home and head straight for the bathroom.

6) Unwrap your new hat. Put it on, and admire yourself in the mirror.

7) Wander nonchalantly into the kitchen, put away the groceries, and wait for your wife to notice your cute new headgear.

8) Try not to get upset as she laughs her leg off for half an hour.



Iluvit. And I'm sure if I put my mind to it, I could balance a stack of pizza bases on it.

Invertir En Cine

Invertirencine.com is now live ('invertir en cine' is Spanish for 'invest in film'). It's the Spanish version of the Film Production Investments site I mentioned last week - oh, and anyone who had trouble viewing that, there was a glitch with the server DNS, which is now fixed.

So now we're working on the German version. All good fun.

Independent Film Investment

For the last month, I've had my head deeply immersed in work, creating a website for a new client. They're in the film production business, and what they do is find independent film projects that look like they could make money, and then find people to invest in them. We launched the site yesterday (several bottles of Diet Coke were consumed), so now I'm getting busy on the Spanish version, with a German one to follow. And maybe an Arabic one after that. Film production investments site is here. Take a look.

Segovia Again

Segovia was the first place we visited outside Madrid after we arrived three years ago. We had a pretty crummy time, as described here.  I'd always wanted to go back, and when the offspring arrived a few weeks ago, it seemed like the perfect time to do it. I decided to splash out a bit and book tickets on the AVE (Spain's high-speed train).



In case anyone's interested, it took 27 minutes from Madrid Chamartín, reached a top speed of 247kph and cost €10 outbound and €8 for the return trip. For some bizarre reason, the AVE uses a brand-new station in a field about a thousand kilometres outside Segovia - it took the driver of the overcrowded bus  15 minutes before he decided he couldn't squeeze any more passengers in, and the trip into the town centre took 20 minutes.

Nothing much changes in Segovia: it still has its mind-boggling Roman aqueduct,





its gorgeous Cathedral,



and the amazing Alcazar, which we did a tour of.



After the Alcazar tour, we headed off in search of lunch. It's compulsory to have cochinillo (suckling pig) when in Segovia. I had declared that we would not be eating in the pretty Plaza Mayor, on the basis that restaurants in Plaza Mayores all over Spain exist only to steal money off tourists with overpriced, badly-cooked food. But actually, that's where we ended up, and it was pretty good.

A nice day out, methinks.

Down To The River

Unlike all other European capitals, Madrid does not sit astride a big river. It does, however, sit beside a little one, the much ignored Río Manzanares. The lack of flowing water was always a downside to Madrid for us, so I was interested to hear the plan by Alberto Ruíz Gallardón, Mayor of Madrid, to bury about 6 kilometres of the M-30 motorway, which had previously formed a fairly impenetrable barrier between the city and the river (you've got to admire 70s and 80s Town Planning, for its sheer stupidity, if nothing else). With the motorway out of the picture, the plan then was to create a linear park along both banks, a beach, a rowing area and some cafés. Existing bridges would be refurbished, one or two of them closed to traffic, and about nine new footbridges would be built.





Recently we heard that much of the park is now open, so we went to have a peep. I have to say the bit we saw (between Principe Pio and Estadio Vicente Calderón) is very impressive. The hard landscaping uses rough-hewn slabs of granite for walls, smooth granite for footpath edges, and something like rough slate setts for the paths themselves. Metal details like fences and lighting are done in stainless steel. These materials will look good for a very long time, and the stone will actually improve with age, unlike the rain-stained concrete that would have inevitably have been used if this project were done in, say, Sheffield. Plants and trees, obviously, need a couple of years to mature, but I'm looking forward to seeing how it develops.



I'm wondering what they can do get more water into the river - it only seems to be about a foot deep at the moment, although staining on the old embankment walls show it can be a couple of metres deep. We saw two pairs of sluice gates - I guess they could use these to trap more water in the central section.



Anyway, a marvellous project, and I'm sure the EU thinks it was money well spent!

Sharp!

Having been married for almost 25 years (yes, really!), most of our kitchen stuff is about that old. The pans, well, Prestige said they'd last a lifetime, and even though they never specified whose lifetime (the pan's, or the owner's), their little copper bottoms and stainless steel sides are still in fine fettle. The same cannot be said for my chef's knives: dull, dull, dull, and almost impossible to get an edge on. I only realised just how crappy they'd become when I did some cooking at a friend's place a few months ago and used a proper sharp knife. Since then I've been looking around and researching decent knives, and stumbled upon a most remarkable thing: ceramic knives.

Whoa! We are talking insanely sharp, here. The manufacturers say the only thing sharper is diamond, and the edge lasts 10 times longer than steel. Now that we're into August, most of Madrid's population has vamossed, and the shops that remain open are in desperation sale mode. So this evening I went to El Corte Inglés and got me two half-price ceramic knives. Watch this:



I did make the idiotic mistake of testing the big knife in the shop by stroking the blade with a finger. Got a great cut, bludd everywhere, and had to beg a plaster from MamaDuck's place of work when I went to meet her. I'm looking forward to doing some serious cutting with these babies!

Echo-Gnomics

I'm not an economist, politician, or banker. If I was, I would probably be infinitely richer by now. But it intrigues me when politicians whitter on about deficits and so on. The numbers seem to be huge (because, well, they are). But we never get to see them in context. So I did a little Googling, and found this page. It tells us the UK's current deficit is £159.2 BILLION! That's an incomprehensible number; if I was Bill Bryson, I'd illustrate that by saying if you had that amount of money in one-pound coins and stacked them up, it would reach from the Earth to Alpha Centauri. But I'm not, and it probably wouldn't.

Anyway, the point of this post is that  the UK is currently carrying an astounding amount of debt, as a result of the moronic bailing out of the ungrateful coños who run British banks. And the ConDemn coalition are hell-bent on using this to cut every kind of public service they can think of - health, education, public transport, social housing etc.

What you probably don't know is that this deficit represents only 11.4% of GDP. That doesn't seem life-threatening to me. EU rules would like it to be about 3%, but fuck, we're all fucked, aren't we? I don't see the urgency to get this down at the expense of everything that makes a country civilized. Cameroon and co would have us living in caves.

My 2 centimos. Now I have to go out and buy the world's sharpest knife (not a threat or anything: sale at El Corte Inglés).