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THE $10,000 GIN AND TONIC

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

While other cooks devise recipies, Dave Arnold customises coffee machines. He cooks short ribs for three days and uses graphs to boil eggs. And now his drive for perfection has led him to investigate a classic drink. Jon Fasman watches him at work in New York...

From INTELLIGENT LIFE magazine, September 2007

Late one afternoon, Dave Arnold and I linger over coffee at the bar of L'Ecole in lower Manhattan. As director of culinary technology at the French Culinary Institute, Arnold is a frequent guest at its training restaurant. An avid creator of cocktails, he has been on the other side of this bar many times.

Lunch has ended and dinner not yet begun. It is the restaurant's magic hour. Arnold believes almost nobody knows how to make a really good cup of coffee. He starts talking espresso machines with the bartender. L'Ecole has a standard Illy with two double-pronged espresso filters. Arnold has a commercial espresso machine at home (one of many professional-grade machines he bought at restaurant liquidations: he also owns a six-burner Garland range with a salamander broiler, a 35-gallon deep fryer, and he recently got rid of a full-length deli refrigerator case), but his filters have no prongs. He drilled them out. When I ask why, he jumps up from his stool and charges around behind the bar to the machine, wresting off a filter and turning it upside down. Arnold is 36, but has about him something of the boy eternal--dark, floppy hair, bright-blue eyes, a ready smile--that lets him get away with things. The bartender glares at him with that peeved, nonplussed expression that New Yorkers cultivate...and goes back to unloading the dishwasher.

"Look at the bottom here," he says, pointing to the sieve that holds the espresso, "and imagine you're looking from underneath. You're flying blind. You can't see what's going on. When you have the bottom cut out and can actually see the bottom of the basket, you can tell if your shot is actually pulling to one side or the other, or if you're getting little sprays. If it's pulling to one side, it means you're not getting an even dose all the way across. And if you're getting little squirts, it means you haven't packed it properly and you're getting little microchannels through your coffee, which means that unbrewed water is shooting straight into your coffee." He explains this not with outrage--it is, after all, just coffee--but excitedly, triumphantly. Machine tamed; problem solved.

Before Arnold began building and taming machines for chefs, he did it as a sculptor. He built a fire-breathing dragon and fought it with a sword. He built a machine to smash cinderblocks and raced it. He even built a robot frog-army by killing and eviscerating frogs, then attaching their muscles to motorised metal skeletons. The "man versus machine" idea animated all of his projects. To his mind, it was a fallacy that ignored the fact that every machine was built by a person. That makes every mechanical triumph a human triumph-even in the kitchen.

Arnold is part chef and part scientist, part engineer and part food historian. He is a culinary inventor who builds, refines and thinks about machines for chefs. And he is a hands-on culinary intellectual working at the intersection of food and science. For decades, those two disciplines met only as "food science", a subset of the industrial kitchen. "Food scientists" worked out how best to adhere flavour powder to potato crisps; how to puff rice batter for the perfect snap, crackle and pop; how to freeze a cooked hunk of animal protein so a diner could pop it in the oven, pull back the foil top and tuck in in front of the television.

Recently, though, a small but growing band of analytical chefs has brought science into haute cuisine. Not for them the pervasive view of chefs who, as guardians and inheritors of tradition, patiently coax the flavours of pasture and orchard on to a plate. Precise, scientific culinary analysis leads not only to such famous oddities as Ferran Adrià's carrot air or Heston Blumenthal's snail porridge. As Blumenthal's book, "In Search of Perfection", shows, it can also produce a more tender roast chicken, a crispier batter for fish and a peerless pizza. Underlying both Blumenthal's obscure and quotidian creations-underlying this entire movement, in fact--is a relentless curiosity about why things happen as they do, and a refusal to accept received culinary wisdom without questioning it first. Nouvelle cuisine's legacy was an openness to fusion and a lightening of classic French cooking. The scientific movement's legacy will be more cerebral, extensive and unpredictable. Chefs like Blumenthal and thinkers like Arnold are teaching us to re-examine everything we know about cooking.

Back in the French Culinary Institute's hallways, I am discovering that Arnold walks as he talks: purposefully and quickly, but with frequent hesitations, retreads and backtracks. Although I nearly careen off a couple of walls trying to keep pace, he keeps the rotary evaporator he is pushing on a steady course towards 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. The rotavap is used in the laboratory to evaporate solvents gently. It is one of several machines at the beginning of a journey to the kitchen--Arnold is working on a trimmed-down version for the home or bar, where it could create perfect flavour essences in a minute. Bruno Goussault, who runs a company called Cuisine Solutions, brought sous-vide cooking from high-end hotel and aircraft kitchens to haute-cuisine across the world. He is now working for home cooks on simpler models of vacuum machines and immersion circulators, which keep water at a constant temperature. And as chefs like Blumenthal and pioneers like Arnold and Goussault learn more about culinary processes, even home ovens will become more sensitive. By Christmas 2020, you may well cook a 15-pound turkey simply by entering "15-pound turkey" on a display on the front of your range, rather than cranking the oven to high and hoping for the best.

In Arnold's hands, the rotavap is a still, and he uses it 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 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 proved easy: just add a bit of quinine powder to gin. Carbonation was also a breeze. Arnold has come up with a variety of ways to carbonate alcohol directly, either with carbon dioxide or with nitrous oxide, but without fizzy water. The problem was the lime juice. 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 gave similar results. The only thing that boiled off was the 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 have 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 could complicate the process even further is to make the gin, and, as it happens, that's precisely why Arnold is wheeling a machine through the halls of the culinary institute.

The professional culinary world has never been as open to science as it is today. This intellectual awakening began about three decades ago, when Harold McGee, a foundering academic with a scientific background and culinary interests, failed to land a tenure-track job. He decided instead to write a book on why things happen the way they do in the kitchen. What makes popcorn pop? Does searing a steak really "seal in the juices"? What does heat do to the protein structure of animal muscles? In "On Food and Cooking", McGee answered those questions and others like them in clear, unpretentious prose. He relied on observation, experimentation, and empiricism rather than habit, myth and high-handedness. In the introduction McGee quotes Plato's "Gorgias", in which Socrates condemns the unsystematic approach to cuisine, which "preserves by mere experience and routine a memory of what usually happens". The same principle still underlies most culinary training. Do it this way because I told you, because that's the way I learnt, because that's the way it's always been done and because it works. McGee's book lifted a curtain that very few people had ever thought was there.

At around the same time that McGee was researching his book, John McPhee, a writer for the New Yorker, wrote "Brigade de Cuisine", a profile of a chef pseudonymously called "Otto" (he refuses to let McPhee identify him) in the rural north-east. Otto has such stubbornly exacting standards that he runs his kitchen alone: he is his entire brigade de cuisine. The better to highlight such renegade integrity, McPhee visits Idle Wild Farms, which makes frozen entrees for restaurants around the country. After lovingly describing Otto preparing such dishes as pheasant Souvaroff, coulibiac of salmon and osso buco, he shows us faceless workers on an assembly line snipping skinned chicken breasts into perfect five-ounce portions, "metronomically" dropping scoops of eggs whipped with carrageenan on to a conveyor belt to become omelettes, "[their] dimensions programmed exactly by the height of the free fall, the density of the egg custard, and the volume of the scoop". The message is clear: this is science, not art; this is the mercantile future devouring the noble past. True chefs like Otto have nothing to learn from these culinary automatons--and everything to fear.

This view-almost universal when McGee's book appeared, in 1984, and still widely held today-is seductive, romantic and inane. Mass-produced food tastes bad because it is indifferently made from ingredients of average quality; it has nothing to do with the precision that McPhee mocks. Suggesting that chefs who scientifically investigate the nature of the cooking process are somehow vitiating cuisine's ethos makes no more sense than suggesting that surgeons should take out a gall bladder with a little more mystery and soul.

Still, the wall between haute cuisine and science remained firmly in place for about another decade. Pinpointing the exact origin of a movement is a mug's game, but food science remained a province of the industrial and commercial kitchen until the early 1990s, when a number of young chefs--most prominently Ferran Adrià, the triple-Michelin-starred chef of El Bulli, in Catalonia, and Heston Blumenthal, the equally honoured proprietor of the Fat Duck, in Berkshire-began using McGee's approach to question received kitchen wisdom. They also brought industrial techniques and additives into their kitchens. What emerged, roughly speaking, was a playful, inventive, theatrical, highly cerebral style of cooking that was saddled with the tag "molecular gastronomy", a name that Blumenthal, Adrià and McGee have all publicly rejected. (Arnold points out, quite sensibly, that the name is either inaccurate or tautological. No chef actually manipulates molecules, but every aspect of cooking produces molecular changes in the food being cooked.)

Precisely because it is so inventive, playful and new--Blumenthal's tasting menu includes snail porridge, pine sherbet fountain, and parsnip cereal--it is easy to mock. I spoke to John Mariani, the author of six cookbooks and a food writer for Esquire, and Bloomberg, who compared it to "the pod people from 'Invasion of the Body Snatchers'...It's pure sensationalism, unless it's ravishingly tasty, which it rarely is because it's destroying the natural form of the food."

Yet the meal I ate at WD-50--a Michelin-starred restaurant in lower Manhattan whose chef, Wylie Dufresne, is one of America's leading practitioners of experimental cuisine, as well as a friend of Arnold's-was ravishingly tasty. It was also endlessly surprising, thoughtful and fun in a way that haute cuisine too often is not. Dufresne served miso soup with noodles, which sounds humdrum enough, but the noodles came in a little squeeze-bottle that contained shrimp stock thickened with methyl cellulose, a chemical that gels on heating. Squeeze the paste into the soup, and the strands set into pasta. If the noodles somehow destroyed the natural form of shrimp, well, so did making them into stock. The natural form of soyabeans was destroyed to make miso; the natural form of miso was destroyed to make soup. And what is cooking if not the craft of "destroying the natural form" of foods, and turning them into something better, safer and tastier?

Arnold is explaining his method for turning short ribs into something better, safer and tastier to a kitchen full of students. He reaches into a large pan full of water. The pot is not on the stove, but is plugged into the wall. It is, in fact, an immersion circulator--another piece of lab equipment that has migrated to the kitchen-which heats water to a precise temperature, then circulates it to keep the temperature both constant and consistent throughout the pot.

He pulls out a plastic bag containing something that looks like a wet, crumpled old brown sweater. "These short ribs were cooked at 60 degrees Celsius for 72 hours," he says, holding them up. A born teacher, which is to say a born showman, he has a comedian's sense of timing, and he pauses to let the cooking time sink in. A few pairs of eyes widen in disbelief when the students work out he just cooked a dish for three full days. It was supposed to be two, he said, but he had something on the previous night and left the meat in the water. Arnold is teaching a class on low-temperature sous-vide cooking, in which food is vacuum-sealed in plastic and gently warmed for a very long time. You cook meat at its final temperature-rare beef, for instance, is about 60 degrees Celsius. Sous-vide has been adopted by many of the chefs inclined toward scientific experimentation, and for good reason. It relies on precision and observation, it challenges received wisdom, and it redeems something once thought beneath contempt: boil-in-a-bag cuisine.

The vacuumed bag holds salt, pepper, garlic and rosemary as well as the meat. When Arnold cuts it open, the intense, concentrated savoury scent that pours out raises smiles and swoons around the room. Unfortunately, the meat looks vile: flaccid and pink with streaks of grey. Arnold asks for a volunteer to sear the short ribs quickly at high temperature. Chefs love doing things quickly at high temperature, and volunteers abound. The winner is the biggest student in the class, a young man with dark hair and an intimidating scowl who looks about six foot six. With practised casualness he pulls a sauté pan from the supply closet, flings it onto the Garland stove, jacks the heat as high as he can, and films it with oil. When the pan smokes he throws in the two racks of ribs and sears them for about 30 seconds per side. He takes them off the heat, sprinkles some Maldon salt over the top, deftly separates the meat from the bones, and slices them into enough portions for everyone. Beneath the newly browned, smoking exterior, the inside remains gloriously pink. For short ribs, this is extraordinary. Slow cooking usually renders cuts like this an even, well-done grey throughout, but the low temperature has kept the meat rare and moist. I hold back, thinking that it is more important for the students than for me to know what it tastes like, but I quickly overcome my hesitation, and am rewarded with the richest, silkiest, most tender piece of beef I have ever tasted. I overcome my hesitation a few more times, and just when I start to feel guilty for making lunch out of someone else's demonstration, I look up and see the imposing chef who had done the searing gnawing on the bones.

Arnold, however, isn't happy with the result. He thinks meat starts to lose body after a couple of days. It is too soft and it should have a bit more resistance. In fact, he says, plenty of "old-school chefs" stay away from sous-vide meat for precisely that reason. They dislike the textural uniformity, and prefer the dry, overcooked exterior that comes from a hot oven. He has a graph plotting the effects of cooking time on short ribs' "pleasing texture, tenderness and meaty flavour". Whereas the flavour rises slightly after 40 hours, the texture and tenderness decline sharply at the same time. He has similar charts for eggs. One shows what they look like after spending 75 minutes in water heated to 57, 60, 62-68, 72.5 and 75 degrees; the other shows the same for eggs in 64-degree water for times ranging from 22 to 90 minutes.

These charts are so precise and thorough as to seem almost a parody, until you realise how useful they are. As Arnold explained, "Cooking is like golf or bowling...Remove the variables. You're just aiming to be able to do the exact same thing perfectly every time." What Arnold provides with those charts is a guide to making perfect eggs-and not just eggs that you think taste good, but soft-boiled eggs, hard-boiled eggs, eggs for custard, eggs with malleable yolks. Perfect every time.

And this, more than anything else, more than the foams and airs that made Adria's name, more than the purported sensationalism that rankles with traditionalists like Mariani, is what lies at the centre of experimental-cookery movement: the desire for knowledge and precision. At a corner table one quiet afternoon at WD-50, two days after feeding me so superbly, Dufresne waxed poetic about Doritos. To flavour them, liquid is mixed with maltodextrin, and then shot through super-fine nozzles at the top of an arid silo. The liquid dries, adheres to the maltodextrin, and falls to the bottom as powder. "Those spray-dried powders, flavours in spray-dried form," he mused, "What can we do with them? Well, I can roll a scallop in them. I can sprinkle them on a duck. I can cover vegetables with them. I can do a thousand things with them, but I didn't even know they existed until five or six years ago." A decade ago, it would have been unthinkable for a Michelin-starred chef to praise Doritos so publicly, much less to investigate how they were made, and much, much less to find something in their production worth emulating. But why not?

Mariani had sneered, "So much of what these guys are doing is what Kellogg's and General Mills did 100 years ago." Dufresne all but concurred: "Cereal is fascinating to me. I would love to be able to make my own cereal. What do they coat cereal with to keep it crispy in milk? How can I translate that into a dish?...You look for answers to questions, and realise that Clarence Birdseye knew more about freezing in 1910 than you or I know now. All that information is out there." One condemns some culinary knowledge out of guilt by association, the other looks for answers in unexpected places. Which of these is more intellectually respectable?

All of which brings us back to Dave Arnold, the rotary evaporator and the $10,000 gin and tonic. Nils Noron joins us in the kitchen to make the gin. Noron oversees the culinary, pastry and baking programmes at the French Culinary Institute; he used to be the executive chef at Aquavit, a Scandinavian restaurant in midtown. Today he is preparing the aromatics for the gin: cilantro, cucumbers, Thai basil and oranges.

Almost incidentally, he mentions that he and a growing number of chefs use the sorts of additives and techniques that Dufresne uses as a matter of course. He used xanthan gum to give sauces body without over-reduction or cornstarch; much of his meat he cooked in the circulator and shaped with transglutaminase, which bonds proteins irreversibly and is known as "meat glue". Chefs often stay quiet about this sort of additive. Growing in tandem with the experimental cookery movement is a farm-to-table movement that prizes purity above all. These two movements are not necessarily in conflict--chefs like Dufresne and Blumenthal take great pride in the quality of their ingredients, and as Arnold points out, "Just because you have a perfect carrot, that doesn't mean the only thing you can do with it is blanch it in water and serve it with butter". But I doubt hydrocolloids will ever find a place on the shelves of most health-food shops.

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 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." 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-another Dufresne creation--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, as it turns out, is 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.

Photographs by Bruce Davidson

(Jon Fasman has also written for Intelligent Life about the cooking of Wylie Dufresne. His last story on More Intelligent Life was about the "Achewood" comic strip)