Post by al forgnelPost by Bob1) The high tech tools/ingredients challenge struck me as unfair.
There are very bright chefs devoting their food to this stuff -- to
"innovate" first crack out of the box is beyond reasonable
expectations. I don't think it translates either to real restaurant
work OR to actual Iron Chef competitions, where the competitors choose
their own tools and most of their own ingredients. ("Today's secret
ingredient is -- XANTHAN GUM!!!!")
It was a tough challenge. However, they did give them 90 minutes to
play around with the equipment and get familiar with how to use it and
see what they could come up with. If they really wanted people to use
those tools in Iron Chef challenges they should have brought people in
that make use of them regularly like Marcel from Top Chef. He tended
to make a foam in every competition even though there was no call for
it.
Post by al forgnelPost by Bob2) Can somebody explain to me what food folks mean by "simplicity"?
I'm not being snide -- every industry is entitled to it's vocabulary.
In my poor kitchen, a fried egg is simple. :)
I also didn't understand the one bite competition. Were the chefs
supposed to make something that would fit in the mouth entirely? If
so, did any dish qualify? (And why were the competitors allowed to
judge each other? Clearly unfair).
The idea was to come up with something that 'defined' their cooking
style in a single bite. The dish didn't have to be a single bite (the
amous bouche (sp?)), but it had to be something that the judges could
take a single bite of and understand clearly where the chef was coming
from.
Post by al forgnelCooking with machines and chemicals that are usually only found in
factories and laboratories? Isn't the point of fine cuisine, (or
simple home cooking), to avoid these nasty ingredients? Why bother
making a pot of homemade soup if you're going to add this crap? You
might as well buy canned soup with its 900 mg's of sodium per cup.
Would anyone go to a restaurant knowing that they use these things?
The chemicals may not get used a lot, but I don't think those are
known to cause any difficulties for people. The immersion cookers have
been used quite a bit in other shows like "Top Chef," and make a lot
of sense. Because the temperature is so tightly controlled it's
possible to cook a dish in it without being concerned about it being
burned or overcooked. It's not something that will likely ever show up
in a home kitchen, but in a large restaurant focused on fine dining
(i.e. expensive) it makes sense to have it available. The anti-griddle
is a neat device but not something that makes sense unless a chef is
going to use it a lot, and it's mostly just a neat idea in the kind of
product it produces.
Another thing they introduced was the concept of liquid nitrogen. I've
never heard of someone using it to make quick ice cream, but I have
heard of it being used a lot for quick freezing food. It's especially
nice for that since the food after thawing is almost as good as when
it went in, which isn't true if the food goes through the normal
freezing process due to the ice crystals forming and breaking the cell
walls. That results in food that can be mushy, while the nitrogen
frozen food doesn't tend to be mushy due to the cell walls being kept
intact.