IF YOU HAVE A LABORATORY AND A COUPLE OF DAYS TO SPARE

Jon Fasman meets Dave Arnold, director of culinary technology at the French Culinary Institute in New York, and helps him prepare the perfect gin and tonic. The full article can be read in this month's Intelligent Life magazine...

From INTELLIGENT LIFE magazine, September 2007

Dave Arnold walks as he talks: purposefully and quickly, but with frequent hesitations and backtracks. I nearly careen off a couple of walls trying to keep pace with him through the hallways of the French Culinary Institute. He is pushing a rotary evaporator, bound for one of the institute’s test kitchens. The “rotavap” is made of a bell jar that, after being filled with liquid and subjected to a vacuum, rotates slowly in a warm-water bath, where the liquid boils at a low temperature. The resulting vapour flows into a chilled condenser, where it turns back into liquid.

A rotavap is used in a laboratory to evaporate solvents gently. In Arnold’s hands today it is a still, which he wants to use to fix the vexing and eternal problem of the ideal gin and tonic. To Arnold’s taste, a G&T is always either watery from too much tonic, or flat from too little. Fresh lime juice makes it unpleasantly cloudy, and the tonic’s bubbles adhere to the proteins in small lime particles, so the drink goes flat more quickly. Arnold has conceived of the perfect gin and tonic, which would be beautifully clear, chair-grabbingly strong and robustly effervescent. That such a drink neither did exist, nor, given its components, could exist, only heightened the challenge.

Replicating the tonic flavour had been the easy bit: just add a bit of quinine powder to gin. Carbonation was also a breeze. Arnold came up with a variety of ways to carbonate alcohol directly, either with carbon dioxide or with nitrous oxide, but without fizzy water. The lime juice was more of a problem. He tried clarifying fresh lime juice by adding a small amount of gelatin, freezing it, wrapping the frozen block in cheesecloth, and letting it defrost in a large pan (gelatin adheres unusually well to proteins, intensifying the clarifying effect of simple straining). The juice, he says, “clears out, but it tastes dead. It tastes like stale lime juice.”

The rotary evaporator wasn't much immediate help here. The only things that boiled off were chemical compounds with lower boiling points than water. The acids and sugars, which provide the bulk of a lime’s flavour, all remained in the cloudy juice. Arnold’s solution was ingenious. He added malic, citric and succinic acids, and glucose, sucrose and fructose back into the distilled volatiles in the same proportions as in fresh lime juice. The result was a clean, snappy, improved version—Lime Juice 2.1.

And there you had it: a gin and Platonic. It was made from gin, three pure forms of sugar rarely found outside pastry kitchens, three acids and an extract rarely found outside chemistry labs, a $10,000 piece of lab equipment, and hours of experimentation. The only thing that would complicate the process even further would be to make the gin. And that was the job that Arnold had in mind for his rotary evaporator today.

In the kitchen we are joined by Nils Norén, who oversees the culinary, pastry and baking programmes at the institute. He used to be the executive chef at Aquavit, a Scandinavian restaurant in midtown New York. Today he is preparing the aromatics for the gin: cilantro, cucumbers, Thai basil and oranges.

Arnold turns on the evaporator, to cool the condenser, and a jet of chilled alcohol and water shoots on to him from a misdirected tube. He calls his machines “spit-and-bubblegum” contraptions. “If something hasn’t gone wrong”, he says over his shoulder, screwing a part back into place, “you haven’t had the true Dave Arnold experience.”

Watching Arnold sweat and struggle to create a drink that most people could make blindfolded, I am reminded of something Harold McGee, an early proponent of scientific cooking, said about Arnold: “He has a very strong idea about the way that something should be, that doesn’t exist, and then he figures out how to make it.”

Food writer John Mariani condemned this type of food as “late Roman empire” stuff: an empty bauble born of affluence and boredom. When confronted with a $10,000 gin-and-tonic, or a bowl of foie gras made into little pearls and served as a breakfast cereal with bits of chocolate and crisped rice–a speciality of Wylie Dufresne, who cooks at WD-50 in New York–it is difficult not to picture the chef grinning at his own cleverness, nor to cringe at the thought of how much time, energy, money and ingenuity have gone into producing a pre-dinner cocktail. But it is just as difficult not to marvel.

The base of the gin is to be Fleischmann’s vodka, a bottom-shelf brand found at any self-respecting student party. Noren pours the vodka three times through a hand-held charcoal filter to eliminate what he politely calls “the hospital aromas”, then pours it into the bell jar with the pureed aromatics. A couple of hours and a few tired wrists later (the rotary mechanism failed to work; we had to turn the bottle by hand), we had a liquor of a clarity, depth and freshness unlike any I had ever tasted. It had the floral top notes of basil and cilantro, the grassiness of cucumbers, and an earthiness imparted by the roasted oranges.

Alongside it, Arnold served “edible martinis”—cucumbers submerged in gin and vermouth, placed in a Mason jar, and run twice through a vacuum machine. When the seal on the jar is broken, gin rushes in to take the space left vacant by the vacuumed air. Sprinkled with Maldon salt, celery seed and lime zest, they are as alcoholic as the next shot of liquor, but far easier to consume. The watery crunch of a pickle is followed by the pleasant mind-reel of a martini. The tastes are at once new and familiar. Their evolution is traceable from memory to mind to palate.

(Jon Fasman has also written for Intelligent Daily Life about the cooking of Wylie Dufresne.)