Alinea Cookbook

This is a tale of shattered expectations. Well, perhaps not that dramatic, but shattered somethings, at least.

I got the Alinea cookbook at the end of September, and spent the next few days leafing through it with anticipation. It is full of fascinating looking food products. Caramel mixed with some chemical in order to look like rubble. Kumquat jelly. Parrafin wax bowls filled with cold potato veloute and topped with skewers of potato somethings. The problem is that most of the cookbook requires ingredients so exotic that I wouldn't know where to get them, much less how to use them. Not exotic as in truffle, just to be clear, but exotic like Ultra-Tex 3.

After much leafing, I finally found a recipe that seemed achievable. Poached pork tenderloin served with fennel, sage pudding, corn bread puree, grapefruit, honey, and sous vide pork shoulder shredded into strands as if for pulled pork, and then fried in a disk shape until "puffed" (all this as a garnish). The only exotic ingredient was agar agar, which I both have and happen to know how to use.

I embarked on the recipe with the most enigmatic ingredient first, the sage pudding. I boiled water, sugar and salt with sage leaves, and let the mixture steep for 20 minutes, yielding a pale green infusion. I strained the mixture through a chinois, and then brought it to a boil for exactly a minute and a half with 10 g of agar agar. The now weirdly gummy mixture went through a chinois again to strain out any unmelted agar agar, and then sat to cool until solid. Once that happened, I ran the mixture through my food processor on "blend" until I had exactly the smooth pudding I was supposed to get.

At which point I tasted my much slaved over concoction.


I leave open entirely the possibility that I did this all wrong. That my mixture of sugar and salt was off, or that I put too much sage or something. But to my palate, the verdict on this pudding was unmistakeable. There was just no reason that I would choose to eat this thing on my own. None. It was oddly sweet, and salty in all the wrong places. The sage was overwhelming. The mouth-feel a gloppy, thin, slime, like what I imagine astronaut food to be like. I couldn't imagine how it could complement pork.

But putting all that aside, I soldiered on with the corn bread puree. I made the extremely fatty corn bread required by the cookbook (honestly, the best corn bread, for me, has very little sugar and fat, but this was corn cake), and then enriched it further with even more cream and butter as I was processing it into a puree. The result wasn't as disappointing as the sage pudding, which was wretched, but still wasn't something that I thought accomplished anything more than some plain corn bread with honied butter would have.

By this point, I was tired. And not enthused about eating the meal, so I gave up and we went out for some pizza instead. Over pizza, I sat thinking about the larger implications of my failure.

Of course, I'm going to keep working away at the Alinea cookbook when I have the time. It's a gorgeous volume, filled with intriguing things. The larger question, however, is about the entire Alinea project. As I've said before, we're living in a moment now of almost unprecedented advances in local, organic, free-range, traditional farming (add whatever adjectives you will). Micro-farms are turning out the best food we've had in America since before people invented chemicals. Restaurants that feast on that amazing diversity of production are not only flourishing, but multiplying. But at the same time, the most talked about restaurants in the world are restaurants like Alinea, and El Bulli, restaurants at which the quality of the natural ingredients appears to be almost of no consequence, and the benefits of local, organic, free-range, traditional farming entirely undercut by the intentional adulteration of perfectly good food with a chemistry lab worth of industrially produced molecules with nature defying properties. The closest analague to the food these restaurants serve isn't Per Se, but the Taco Bell in the futuristic filmDemolition Man.

It is no good to say in response that salt is a chemical too, like some defenders of this new "cookery" do. It is a chemical, true, and it has seemingly miraculous properties. But you can go to the sea and get salt, by getting some water and letting it evaporate. It is a fruit of the earth. Ultra-Tex 3 is the fruit of the lab. It is exactly the sort of thing that people who love food have been trying to banish for the past two decades, and yet here it is, in beloved restaurants.

I fear, honestly, that our food is going to look more and more like ultra-tex than like the farm, and the best farmed products become more expensive, and chemicals are even better understood by chefs. In that context, I'm going to keep grappling with this new food to see if I can discover some sympathy for it. Obviously, a part of it will be to eat some of this stuff made by people who love cooking this way. But at this point, I feel like the new gastronomy is a frankenstein-ian step backwards along a path we'd been hiking positively for more than two decades, and I wish it would go away.