Classic Dishes, Redux- Brainstorming on Eggs Benedict.

In the past decade, there has been a new movement in the culinary world. Utilizing different skill sets than in the past, these trail blazing chefs, like Ferran Adria of El Bulli in Spain, Heston Blumenthal of The Fat Duck in England, and Grant Achatz of Alinea here in the States, are creating culinary flights of fantasy that make for exquisitely memorable meals. The only problem with this is that the great masses of people aren't quite ready to eat things that they can't readily identify. As a consequence, many people are standoffish, leaving the modern food to "foodies." Witness Snackbar, Ltd. in Philadelphia. When they first opened in 2006, they offered high-end modern cooking. Philadelphians stayed away in droves. In the words of their chef, Jonathon McDonald, he was "cooking for an empty dining room for six months." In the end, he had to radically conventionalize his menu. So it begs the question: How do we introduce modern cooking to the masses? Call me crazy, but I think it's high time for all these newfangled techniques and ingredients in the world of cookery, so-called 'molecular gastronomy,' or modern cooking, as I like to call it, to be used in a way that makes sense to their palates. What better way to do this than to take classic dishes that everyone knows and modernize them? 

Brainstorming

That's where I come in. I'm here to explore the world of ways to offer familiar dishes and flavors, treated in new and exciting ways. But where to begin? So many dishes cry out for modernization. Do we start with French? American? Italian? I think I've got an even better idea. Start at home, with something simple. Something everybody knows. Breakfast. Everybody eats or has eaten breakfast. And there's so many options there, too. Waffles, maybe? How about Pancakes? Bacon and eggs have been done, Heston Blumenthal with his definitive Nitro-scrambled eggs and candied bacon dish, so that's out. I'm thinking something where there's a few ingredients to play with. Hmmm... I got it! That bastion of brunch, king of hotel breakfast, served and butchered far and wide from the greasiest of spoons to the classiest brunch: Eggs Benedict! 

But what to do with it? Lots of options when you open the door to more modern cooking techniques. A slow-poached egg perhaps, a hollandaise foam... hmm, not bad ideas but we can take it further. Seems a little simple. If we're gonna take this one apart and put it back together, that's exactly what we'll have to do.  

Let's start with hollandaise. What's in hollandaise? Egg yolks, lemon juice, salt, cayenne, butter... Ok, the butter. There's a great new-school ingredient called tapioca maltodextrin. I know that if I mix it in a 3:2 ratio with any fat, it absorbs the fat, transforming it into a powder. It reconstitutes in the presence of moisture, so when you eat it, it melts immediately. So I would have to clarify the butter and remove the liquid before I powder it. But powdered butter is kind of boring... People might not like just butter powder... What do people like? People like fried things! I remember reading on www.texturaselbulli.com where Ferran Adria has a recipe where he makes a bitter almond oil powder, then sautes it to brown it... I could do that! Crispy butter! Who wouldn't go for crispy butter? 

Ok, so that's one component of the hollandaise(whew!). What's left? Pretty much the flavor elements of the sauce. If we seperate these too far from one another the dish will start to lose it's character. I mean, I could go all out, make some sort of cayenne tuile, maybe a confit of preserved lemon, a spherical egg yolk... wait, why not just take the other ingredients, combine them as though I were making a hollandaise, then make a sphere out of that? In fact, that could be my egg yolk for the egg! 

Spherification is a pretty simple process, for the most part. You add a substance called sodium alginate(a polysaccharide extracted from brown algae) to a flavored liquid of choice, mix up some water with some form of calcium, like calcium chloride or calcium lactate, and drop droplets or spoonfuls of alginate mixture into it. The drops turn into little balls, or "spheres," that are solid on the outside, and liquid on the inside. Just like... an egg yolk! Perfect... it'll be like a hollandaise-flavored egg yolk... Nice.  Now with the acidity from the lemon juice and the calcium in the egg yolk, those might present a problem. At least that's what Martin Lersch's invaluable resource, Texture: A Hydrocolloid Recipe Collection would have me believe. (It can be downloaded for free here.)  It says that acidity can prevent the desired gelling. The USDA says here that 90.5% of the calcium in the egg in its yolk, at 21.9 mg per yolk. Would that be enough to start off the gelling of the sodium alginate? Maybe. But there's another technique, reverse spherification, where you put the calcium in the flavored liquid and the alginate in the water... that might stop the calcium in the egg yolk from making the alginate gel ahead of time, but what about the acidity of the lemon? Egg yolks have a pH of about 6.0, and lemon juice has a pH of about 2.4. Lersch says that the alginate won't gel if the pH is less than 4. So as long as I don't add enough lemon juice to lower the pH below 4, then it would be fine. But will that be enough to add the proper flavor? Perhaps, since we're not adding any butter, we'll have to scale back the lemon, salt and cayenne. So that's that. A hollandaise-flavored yolk.

That covers the hollanadaise and the egg yolk. What's left? Egg white, canadian bacon, english muffin... Hmm. Perhaps a poached egg white could be a textural foil for the crispy butter and smooth yolk... If i poached it in a small cup I could control the shape, make it nice and perfectly round, then remove the center, and replace the yolk, so it would appear to be simply an egg... interesting...

Then we have the ham. What can we do to the ham? What if we had the flavor of the ham, and the texture of the ham, but it wasn't ham at all? That would be a fun play. So what tastes like ham? I really love the flavor of smoked ham hocks. Canadian bacon is cold-smoked. That could work. Maybe a gelée?  If I made a strong stock from the smoked ham hocks, I might just be able to manipulate that into something ham-like. I could set it into a firm gel with gelatin or gellan, or make a crisp sheet with agar or methylcellulose.  But a seared piece of canadian bacon is crisp on the outside and chewy inside... What if I set the gelée with gelatin to a firm texture, then crisped the outside somehow? Lersch says again that methylcellulose, a modified polysaccharide derived from cellulose-rich plants, gels when heated and then melts when it cools. If I set the gelée with gelatin, maybe I could then spray some methylcellulose on the outside and activate it with a quick wave of a blowtorch. Then again, gelatin melts quickly in the heat. If there was a way to set it that it wouldn't melt... Maybe sodium alginate again? It's gels won't melt. So I could set the gelée with alginate and calcium, cut to the desired shape, then, before serving, spray with a mix of the ham stock and methylcellulose, and torch it quick to crisp the outside. 

Whew. What does that leave? The english muffin. What can we do there? That's a real head scratcher. You could change it out for different breads... but that would be leaving the idea of the english muffin behind. Maybe if I could wrap the whole concoction in an english muffin sort of like another classic, Beef Wellington, maybe slice it and serve it on the bias? Well, I could cut a circle out of the middle of an english muffin and put everything in the ring that's left... but that smacks of throwaway... wasting the middles of the muffin and just generally not being as refined as the rest of the dish. Maybe if I baked my own english muffins, I could form them into the desired shape. Now english muffins aren't really baked so much as griddled or cooked on a hot plate. Its part of what gives them their characteristic texture and browned top and bottom, which is really what I want to preserve. So how could I griddle them into a cylindrical shape? What other types of bread are cooked in a similar manner, but in a different shape? What about naan bread, which is cooked by sticking dough to the outside of hot clay tandoori ovens. Maybe if I had something as hot as a griddle that was the desired shape, I could stick the dough to it. What if I took a short length of metal pipe, and heated it in the oven, perhaps I could put the dough on that? But that would only brown the inside. The outside might cook, but the texture would be wrong. If I could get a piece of pipe of a larger diameter and heat it as well, I could slip it around the dough on the smaller pipe. Then it would be the right shape and the right texture.

Wow. Looks like I've got my work cut out for me. Look forward to upcoming blogs where I try each step, and eventually work toward assembling the whole dish.