Hasta La Gadget!

Induction stoves may be making their way into restaurant kitchens, but for home cooks they’re still a mystery. Fortunately, Wired product editor (and food geek) Mark McClusky volunteered to enlighten us:

It took me nearly an entire evening in the the kitchen at Alinea before I realized what was weird about it. Sure, there’s the stunning intensity of the chefs as they prepare Grant Achatz‘ intricate dishes, and the nearly-operating room level of cleanliness. But that’s not what struck me one night at the end of service. What struck me is that I didn’t know where the stove was.

You see, in most restaurant kitchens—like most home kitchens—the stove is the focal point of the room, the place that all the action revolves around. If you’re running the sauté station in most big restaurants, you’re the man, the line cook who’s banging out the most food in the hottest, most extreme environment. You’re the alpha cook.

Not so at Alinea. Of course there’s a stove, but it’s much smaller than you’d expect for a kitchen that puts out a couple of thousand plates a night, just four burners and a flat top. Instead, the chefs at Alinea do the vast majority of their cooking using induction burners, portable ones from CookTek.

Induction is just plain cool. Instead of using a flame like gas, or radiant heat like standard electric burners, induction burners use a magnetic field. The field creates heat through the property outlined in Joule’s first law—you do remember your thermodynamics, right?—in which current passing through conductive material generates heat.

So what? Well, a couple of things. First, induction is super-efficient. Induction burners convert about 85% of the energy you pour into them into heat, compared to about 70% for electric burners and 40% for gas. That means you’ll spend less to cook on induction.

And since the burner itself doesn’t create heat, it stays cool to the touch—take the pan off, and you can put your palm on it. That also means that they don’t throw off ambient heat like gas or electric, so the kitchen stays much cooler.

Then, there’s the responsiveness of induction. Like gas, when you turn it off, there’s no residual heat from the burner, just the pan. Plus, there’s the flexibility of portable burners like Alinea uses. Frying something smelly? Got an outdoor power outlet? Set up a portable burner, and you can keep the stink out of your house. Want to keep soup warm at a party? Throw a burner on the buffet, and you’re good to go.

The one thing to keep in mind is that your pans do have to be magnetic. That might be a pain in the ass, especially if you’re hip deep in anodized aluminum pots. But the good news is that some of the cheapest (and most fun to use) cookware around—cast iron—works amazingly on induction burners, as will all your fancy pots as long as they’ve got some stainless steel kicking around in them. If in doubt, grab a magnet from your fridge door to check.

As far as specific models to check out, Circulon makes a nice burner, and Spanish appliance giant Fagor has one. For the best combo of power and price, check out the Max Burton 6000, which puts out 1800 watts for just $125 retail.

That’s how to cook like they do at the best restaurant in America. Or, really, it’s how to cook with the same methods. The talent is up to you.

Mark McClusky is products editor at Wired magazine, and one of the authors of the Alinea book. You can follow him on Twitter @markmcc. Also check out his special section, The Future of Food.

Taste Test is our weeklong tribute to the leaps that occur when technology meets cuisine, spanning everything from the historic breakthroughs that made food tastier and safer to the Earl-Grey-friendly replicators we impatiently await in the future.

Top image found UNCREDITED at Titanium Elite, Green By Design and This Old House; most likely a promotional image for Sauter cooktops.

It’s hard to think of anything more essential to human survival than eating. And yet that very primal act of gobbling sustenance has, of late, become one of the most genuinely perplexing things we people do.

Notice the sudden flood of books and movies covering the evils of industrialized food? Since Taste Test is, after all, a look at “technology’s transformation of food,” we felt we’d be remiss in skipping this particularly stormy subject. We turned to Georgina Gustin, food reporter for the St. Louis Post-Dispatch, for answers. Here’s what she has to say:

Eating is no longer just eating. Beyond tooth decay or bad gas, food has consequences. For our health, for the environment, for the giant, interconnected economy that feeds us, for poor farmers in far away countries, for rich farmers in the US, for the politicians we elect.

History Lesson
Hundreds of years ago, this was not the case. We ate whatever we could grow or get our hands on. (We were less towering, but so svelte!) Then we started moving to cities, away from the patches of dirt that sustained us, and things started getting complicated. Today, more than two centuries into the modernization of food, the situation is yet more baffling. I spend every day writing about food, and even so, a walk through the grocery store can be taxing. (Maybe not as exhausting as spearing a wild boar for lunch. But still.)

Here’s a very, very abridged and over-simplified version of what happened:

A guy in France developed canning for Napoleon’s troops. Some years later his compatriote, Louis Pasteur, figured out that heating beverages killed nasty bacteria. A few decades after that, Clarence Frank Birdseye worked out a viable way to freeze food without ruining it.

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These developments (and others) meant that food could travel and last longer without making people sick. It also meant food companies could make money. At the same time, people began leaving farms. Efficiencies in food production, transportation and agriculture, eventually helped along by government subsidies, meant companies could produce more food more cheaply and send it farther and farther afield. All of which led to a globalized, mechanized, commoditized system that delivers fresh strawberries to Alaska in January and produces highly processed food with long lists of ingredients, sourced from literally hundreds of places.

Mystery Meat
Today the average American grocery store has 50,000 products, leaving the average shopper with a staggering amount of hype and packaging to choose from—and very little idea about the contents therein. In fact, the grocery store now is largely about disguise. Ever see the “Smart Choices” label on the front of food packages in the grocery store? It was devised in part by food manufacturers to guide consumers to healthier choices. Among them: Fruit Loops.

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A child eating a stegosaurus-shaped chicken nugget probably has no sense whatsoever that the breaded matter in front of him came from a bird (a bird that may have been pumped full of drugs, so fattened it can’t walk without breaking its own legs). The fish labeled “Product of China” may, in fact, have come from somewhere else and only been processed in China. Genetically modified products make their way into an estimated 60 percent of the food in our grocery stores, but the government does not require labels announcing this.

In other words, thanks to technology, we have no idea what we’re eating most of the time and that, possibly, is why we’re gorging ourselves into obesity and sickness. We’re infinitely detached from what sustains us, from the farmers, fishermen, canners and cowhands who work in the service of a bunch of multinational corporations that answer to shareholders, rather than public health. That very vital thing that keeps us alive has become an abstraction.

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Progress?
So where have all these advancements in food gotten us? Depends on who you ask.

Fewer farmers are doing the backbreaking work of growing things or coping with the cruel vagaries of weather. Today about 2% of Americans work on farms. At the turn of the last century, that figure was 40%. These days Americans spend less than 10% of their disposable income on food, which is less than most countries in the world. The industry employs millions of people. Then there’s genetic engineering, which, its developers say, holds the promise of growing more food with less fertilizer and less water on less land. This will be very handy, they point out, when the world’s population reaches the estimated 9 billion in 2050 and we run out of farmland.

These are huge accomplishments. We Americans can feed ourselves, many times over. We’re not scratching around for calories.

Going Local
But more Americans—concerned for their health, the environment, the welfare of farmers or all three—now saying they want to take food back into their own hands. They say they want unprocessed, “real” food grown on a farm, preferably close to where they live so as not to rack up the “food miles” (though even this, the distance food travels from farm to consumer, may or may not define a food’s environmental impact depending on whose study you read). They’re eschewing the mystery of pre-packaged foods at the supermarket for the stuff they get at the farmers’ market or their own backyard gardens.

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This “locavore” movement is tiny relative to the multi-billion dollar food industry, but its marketing appeal has become so powerful that it’s grabbed the industry’s attention nonetheless. It’s the new “going green.” Earlier this year, Frito-Lay launched a “Lay’s Local” marketing campaign highlighting the local farmers who grow potatoes for their chips. Go to any grocery store and you’re likely to find signs that boast of a product’s proximity.

The idea that regions can and should provide their own food—that the country should overhaul its food superstructure into regionally based systems—has earned a lot of followers recently (not to mention an iPhone app). But some thinkers call this regressive, pointing out:

A. It would be tough to feed all of us this way.

B. It’s more efficient and less environmentally taxing to grow what’s native, or most easily produced, in one area, and trade with other areas for the rest.

C. An all-local diet in, say, Bismarck, North Dakota would be pretty grim come winter, in spite of the movement towards old-timey skills like canning and pickling to preserve the seasonal harvest. Yaaay sauerkraut!

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So What’s An Eater to Do?
It’s pretty tough for the average American to eat a virtuous, healthy diet—and it’s expensive. Most of us don’t have the time, skills or space to grow our own food, and we can’t all shop at farmers’ markets either. The influential omnivore Michael Pollan issued some simple guidance in his most recent book: “Eat food. Not too much. Mostly plants.” Pollan also suggests eating things with no more than five ingredients on the label, or shopping the perimeter of the grocery store, where the fresh goods and produce sit, rather than the center, where all the processed and frozen stuff is.

But what would happen if everyone bought locally? If they veered away from the frozen section? Or anything containing high fructose corn syrup, which is in nearly everything we eat?

Would we see food giants implode and the wholesale remaking of the American, and global, food economies? The collapse of modern agriculture and a return to a pastoral past that may not have been as idyllic as we like to think? Would millions lose jobs? Would we all lose weight?

We don’t know.

In the meantime, expect to be confused. Expect new and conflicting advice on healthful eating. Expect movies and books to scare the hell out of you, and food corporations to maintain profitable illusions. Read labels cautiously. Be mindful with each bite. And if something smells bad, don’t eat it.

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Further Reading/Viewing:
• Just Food: Where Locavores Get It Wrong and How We Can Truly Eat Responsibly, by James E. McWilliams
• Animal, Vegetable, Miracle: A Year of Food Life, by Barbara Kingsolver
• Food Politics: How the Food Industry Influences Nutrition and Health, by Marion Nestle
• The End of Food, by Paul Roberts
• Omnivore’s Dilemma: A Natural History of Four Meals, by Michael Pollan
• In Defense of Food: An Eater’s Manifesto, by Michael Pollan
• Fast Food Nation: The Dark Side of the All-American Meal, by Eric Schlosser
• The Jungle, by Upton Sinclair

• Food Inc., by Robert Kenner and Eric Schlosser
• Super-Size Me, by Morgan Spurlock

Georgina Gustin writes about all things serious and food-related for the St. Louis Post-Dispatch, and occasionally writes not-as-serious things about food, travel and design for several national magazines. She is also the editor of Buttered Lark, a soon-to-be-launched web magazine devoted to food and place. This is her first Gizmodo contribution. She likes sandwiches.

Taste Test is our weeklong tribute to the leaps that occur when technology meets cuisine, spanning everything from the historic breakthroughs that made food tastier and safer to the Earl-Grey-friendly replicators we impatiently await in the future.

For this week’s Photoshop Contest, I asked you to imagine up some kitchen gadgets that have yet to be invented. And if I don’t have a faucet that dispenses hot cheese by the end of the decade, I’ll be pissed.

A couple of weeks ago, I went to visit chef Wylie Dufresne at his restaurant wd~50, and he showed me his toys and the food that he makes with said toys.

Wylie Dufresne is one of the preeminent experimental chefs in America. He deconstructs the food that we’re familiar with and then, using tools and ingredients that are rarely seen in restaurant kitchens, builds them back up in near-unrecognizable forms. His amazing eggs benedict, for example, features deep fried cubes of hollandaise sauce and a little cylinder of egg yolk the texture of fudge.

So I was clearly excited to see where the magic happened in his kitchen, and I wasn’t disappointed. Over the course of this week I’ll be posting the videos I shot during my kitchen tour, starting with how Wylie uses liquid nitrogen. In it, he shows me how he uses the stuff to create perfectly spherical balls of ice cream surrounded by chocolate cookie crumbs. Because the microphone on the Flip video camera I used is about as good as the mic on a rotary phone, a transcript of the video is below.

What’s getting a lot of sway right now with urban chefs is liquid nitrogen. Liquid nitrogen, much the same way you can a use hot oil to fry things at 375 degrees, with liquid nitrogen you can freeze things at about minus 275 degrees. And you know, people get excited because it’s so cold that when it’s exposed to the air it turns into a gas, which is a very Hollywood or rock and roll sort of thing.

[Pastry chef Alex] takes more or less sort of a cookie, he would kill me if I said this, but not all that far off from sort of an Oreo cookie, purees it, adds some fat to it, purees it into a liquid phase. Then they take ice cream, milk flavored ice cream. They pipe the milk ice cream into a bowl of liquid nitrogen. So it gets super frozen and from there they drop it into the liquid cookie and they roll it after that in cookie crumbs. And what happens is the ice cream is so cold it instantly sets a shell, even though its in a liquid, on the outside and then they can scoop it out and roll it in some crumbs. And then you get, you know, whatever they call those Dibs or Dabs that you get at the movies. This is a much better, much more high end version.

Taste Test is our weeklong tribute to the leaps that occur when technology meets cuisine, spanning everything from the historic breakthroughs that made food tastier and safer to the Earl-Grey-friendly replicators we impatiently await in the future.

Researchers at the Fraunhofer Institute have developed a small device that can be used to check the freshness of fruit, telling the interested parties whether it’s ripe or not. Based on previous technologies which measure, for example car emissions, the device measures the volatile gases emitted by the fruit and analyzes its makeup to determine the state of freshness. The team already has a working prototype, and sees the device, which would cost somewhere in the thousands of dollars range, as having widespread application for businesses that supply food to grocery stores. So far the device has only successfully been used to test the freshness of fruit, but researchers see possible future applications in testing meat as well.

Filed under: Science

Fraunhofer Institute’s fruit checker device tracks optimum ripeness so you can stop sniffing those melons originally appeared on Engadget on Tue, 04 Aug 2009 22:31:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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