YOU love to cook? Everyone wants to cook in his own way, thinking his own way is right, because the wheel, like fire, can be reinvented by Tom, Dick and Harry—even by the punk with tattoos. But what if you are invited to cooking lessons with a visiting foreign chef, who resembles a punk with tattoos?
England-born Ryan Clift did not create a whole new method, but he was in Manila recently to demonstrate to a chef’s class a style of progressive modern cooking learned from his former masters. He created black foam, toasted it and broke it into coral-like forms to surround a slab of salmon, terrarium-style, on a plate. But no one really had a taste of the edibles, because they were for your eyes only.
For many chefs present, it was the first time they had witnessed an actual demonstration of molecular cuisine. Call it Einstein in the cafeteria, let’s swap the beef jerky’s atoms with fruit ions, bring in the electromagnetic death rays, but some will not be amused. Molecular cuisine promises to change the face of dining by manipulating molecules to whip up avant-garde concoctions, but the merits of the molecular are still being debated.
So a few of Manila’s most popular chefs converged at The Epicurean Lab of Global Culinary and Hospitality Academy Makati (www.globalacademyph.com), touted in a recent press kit to be the “New School,” although it is doubtful if they are connected to The New School (est. 1919) in New York. (By the way, The New School, the one found strewn across Greenwich Village in Manhattan, gave to the world Parsons School of Design, renamed Parsons The New School for Design in 2005. The New School is a proud purveyor of Nietszche, Deleuze, Foucault, Baudrillard and other critical late modernists.)
Like the noncontroversy of similar brand names, such as McDonald’s and its Filipino iterations (i.e., Mang Donald’s and Big Mak), there will hopefully be no international copyright and branding squabbles in the making between The New School and “New School,” although “New School” in the press kit definitely sounded more saucy than any joint selling hamburgers. So to avoid confusion, we shall call the venue The Epicurean Lab at Global Academy instead.
THE Epicurean Lab hosts culinary experiments at the second floor of this cooking school along Jupiter Street near the back of the Oppen Building, where you can avail of parking space, a rarity in an area packed shoulder-to-shoulder with restaurants and day-long vehicular traffic owing to the bottlenecks of Buendia corner Makati Avenues and the gate of Bel Air II.
This is probably why the “New School,” or rather Global Academy, opted for this chunk of real estate, because of its location, location, location. The Global Academy also has branches in Alabang-Zapote Road in Muntinlupa, Meralco Avenue in Pasig, and Timog Avenue in Quezon City. The sites are near restaurants because the school—and its laboratory—wants to capture a two-fold market.
Inside the Makati campus, we noted a lot of coño kids who wanted to cook, and professional chefs on the lark for reeducation. The younger set were students of the Global Academy’s various diploma courses in hospitality and culinary arts. Meanwhile, the professional chefs were there to partake of The Epicurean Lab’s mission to “explore cutting-edge professional cooking in order to eventually share this information through classes and collaborations with chefs, food professionals, educational institutions and purveyors.” Ryan Clift’s lectures were a project of The Epicurean Lab.
Eagerly watching the class and taking notes were the chefs-patrons of some of Manila’s dining meccas. Already professionals in their niche markets, some of the chefs may, by virtue of media exposure, be called “celebrity chefs.”
Back to the lesson
Already considered a celebrity chef in Singapore by virtue of his restaurant The Tippling Club, Ryan Clift’s arms were covered up to the middle forearm with Japanese tattoos of koi—or were those dragons? Beneath his chef’s apron, he wore street jeans and sneakers. There were times during the lectures when he would spout expletives—all in the manner of Western-style fun. He was at The Epicurean Lab to give a demonstration of the sous-vide (pronounced /su~vi~d/), a.k.a. the cryovacking, technique. Sous-vide is French for “under vacuum.”
The method involves cooking food vacuum-sealed in plastic bags that are immersed in a water bath. Sous-vide maintains the integrity of ingredients and achieves precision through specially-made digital cooking equipment. Clift’s lectures were sponsored by Julabo Philippines, a local distributor of Fusion Chef, a brand of sous-vide cooking equipment.
So in the course of three summer mornings recently, Clift explained that sous-vide cooking is able to capture and create more distinct flavors since food molecules are sealed within their own pocket universes. The chef demonstrated that there are tried-and-tested techniques that students had better know before they invest in expensive sous-vide equipment.
Cooking of my mother
SINCE the time man first laid meat on fire, we have had a love/hate relationship with cooking and eating. Feasts were obligatory rituals to celebrate harvests. An animal was slaughtered, its blood was drained, it was dressed with spices, it was cooked on a spit. The heavenly flavors reached Olympus. With your cup, make a toast to the gods who did not want man to play with fire. This was why Prometheus was bound on a stone.
God got angry and chained him on a rock where he was visited daily by an eagle who would eat his flesh. Why? Because Promotheus played with fire. He gave man that most precious gift.
Now man wants to reinvent the eternal flame. Sous-vide, according to Ryan Clift, promises to give a better taste of selected ingredients in the vacuum. Additionally, he said “With sous-vide, you can expect more servings” since food molecules are trapped within the plastic cosmos.
Like a Prometheus who would give us a new fire, or a savior who could feed a flock of 500 on the hill of Beatitudes, will sous-vide feed the entire world with three broiled fish and a basket of bread?
The laboratory reminds us that new technologies will forever be marketed as the next horizon, and perhaps they are. Like nanotechnology, which manipulates molecules to be the motors and machines themselves, a more compleat form of bio-nanotechnology may be combined with vacuum-cooking methods to solve bigger problems.
Forget about taste for now. Remember, the world cannot feed itself. Molecular cuisine will eventually grow up. But what should really interest us is how modern gastronomy, combined with the technology of molecules, plans to save the planet. So forget about taste. Stick to what’s essential. The food crisis is something chefs haven’t solved, yet we continue to eat, like its the last meal on earth.
IN PHOTO -- CHEF Ryan Clift(top) overseas the kitchen at The Tippling Club, perhaps the most expensive restaurant in Singapore. Changing the face of dining(above) by manipulating molecules to whip up avant-garde concoctions, like this salad on a bed of gel.
