*Ok, ok, y’all hate reading white text on black background. This site redesign is for you because I love you, but I want you to know how deeply this cuts. You see, it’s the story of my life. Little known fact: I’m half-black, but I’m packaged in this damn white skin. My mom is all brown and beautiful with a great rack (I can say that, right?) and perfect tone. I always wished I looked more like her, but no. And now it’s the same with my blog. You feel better with it lighter because that’s how you know it, it’s easier to drink in. When I switched it to black, it was like when I brought a boyfriend home for the first time who had never met my mom- a bit of a shock. Fine. It’s back. But at least in atonement maybe you’ll think about casting a vote my way for Project Food Blog Challenge #2. Voting ends Sept. 30th, thanks, rant over.

Did you know (or care) that the creator of this dish, Grant Achatz’ name rhymes with Scant Hatchets? I’m always good for a piece of useful trivia, right? I’m going to try and abate my girlish crush on this man’s food, because inevitably you will tire of listening to me wax on like Ralph Macchio in The Karate Kid about his culinary prowess, but allow me this post, please. I’ll make it worth your while.

I haven’t gone all gooey over someone like this since the sixth grade. I was in Alpine Valley, Wisconsin and the sun was setting over the bursting amphitheater. He took to the stage and had me with the first “Oh” of his resoundingly poetic “Oh oh oh oh oh, oh oh oh oh.” By the time he got around to crooning “the right stuff,” my knees were jelly and my heart was throbbing through my freshly-silkscreened concert tee. Yes, folks, Joey McIntyre clutched the gilt-edged key to my young heart, and no amount of harsh reality could keep me from swooning for his ticklish tenor and amorous moves. At this point in my life I am simply mortified that I made a New Kid on the Block the object of my amour. I hope my affection for a certain ginger chef makes up for my transgression.

Incidentally, I took that Joey Joe crush so far as to fake a fainting spell in order to get back stage. My plan was foiled when they unceremoniously carted me to the infirmary like a sack of shallots with no regard to the fact that my prepubescent panties were peeking out from under my disheveled skirt for all to sneeringly see. When I “came to,” I did not find myself breathing in the sweet smell of my paramour clutching at my breastbone to see if he could rouse me. Instead, malodorous vomit tinged with peppermint schnapps assaulted my olfactory senses wafting over from the careening concertgoer next to me, and I realized the infirmary was segregated from backstage, likely, for this very reason.

Being that I was not yet adolescent I did not have much in the way of bazoombas (still don’t- damn boob fairy missed my house!) to flash at the bouncers in order to obtain a backstage pass. Therefore I reluctantly accepted a lollipop from the jaded nurse and sheepishly made my way out of the arena with nary a look back at the lover who so clearly jilted me in front of 15,000 witnesses. Fast forward 20- odd years. What if I walked into Alinea and Grant Achatz did not so much as pity me with a glance? I would still have his food to warm my heart, which, I have a sneaking suspicion will probably give me more long-term joy than the fleeting crooning of NKOTB.

There is a vocal minority of respectable foodfolk out there who loathe molecular gastronomy on principle. To any who find themselves in that faction, I present a standing invitation to dinner chez moi. I have heard a plethora of reasons why you hate it, but I’d like to give you a few reasons to love it, and I know I could with this dish. Yes, it involves froth, foam, gel, spheres and ice. I know many of those words are not traditionally associated with food, but, as with young love, close your eyes and let your tongue to the exploring. If you don’t like what you taste, I’ll buy you a hamburger.

This dish involves a process of reverse spherification to make the beets. It is called reverse spherification because the sodium alginate composes the bath that seals the beet juice into spheres rather than being added to the juice directly and then soaking in a bath of calcium lactate (or chloride) as with traditional spherification. The beet spheres are nestled on a bed of ice made from sweetened verjus, which is sold in the vinegar section of specialty stores and is an acidic juice made from unripened grapes. It’s revelatory, and totally worth hunting around to locate a bottle. In addition to the verjus ice, a foam and a froth accompany the beet spheres, both made from different distillations of lemon thyme. I made enough beet spheres to feed a small army (who would then end up with red pee- how do you like that visual?) so I served them over several days. Ultimately I decided this dish works best as an amuse bouche, perhaps even before wine, as the verjus is such a refreshing pique to the palate.

FYI- no corn here. Those are egg yolks, baby.

Hear that? It’s the collective sigh of food bloggers across the continent steeling themselves for the inevitable 4pm sunsets, hence no natural light in which to take decent pictures of their plates. Sorry these photos lack finesse- I promise to lug out ye old studio light kit asap.

How have I never done this before? I LOVE eggs. I LOVE butter. Why oh why did I not think to poach eggs in butter? Because I’m not a genius like Grant Achatz. Though I do have a few good years left in me to enjoy the wonder of egg yolks positively oozing with unctuous butter, so in that regard I’m fortunate to have discovered it now. It’s probably better- truth be told- that I didn’t cut my teeth on buttery yolk drops- my ass would be a doublewide by now if I had. I’m going to stop right now and tell you that if you value your girlish figure and you don’t run a gazillion miles a week or schlup up the stairmaster whilst watching dishy soaps, you might not want to keep reading this.

Alright, now that the crazies are gone, let’s get down to business. Let me just finish licking a stray yolk drop up off the floor. Yes, these little protuberant pearls of giddy gold fall into the rare category of floor-licking good. Have you ever done that before? C’mon, be honest, I really want to know how many of you have licked something up off the floor. I fully admit I have. Your turn. A few years ago we came up with this scale for wine:

1. Wouldn’t even serve it to your senile Grandpa who lives by the crick and thinks Bud is beer
2. Might pass it off at a giant party around 2am when no one can tell the difference anyway
3. Would drink it from a flask at the rodeo, but never from stemware at home
4. A passable daily drinker- potentially comes in a spacebag
5. 12 person dinner party wine- can’t spend too much but clearly must be palatable
6. Would be mildly upset if you spilled a glass of this one
7. If it were corked, you might drink it anyway because the last bottle was so damn good
8. You secretly horde this bottle in the back room during parties, and pour yourself pint-sized glasses when you sneakily refill
9. Cry genuine tears if you accidentally somehow shatter this bottle
10. Lick up off the floor any spilled drops, even if the floor is at a hoedown

The list works decently well for food too, though you have to change some of the analogies. These yolk drops are Bo Derek on the scale- a perfect 10- and I’m not the only one who thinks so. These babies pleased everyone from the toddler to the “selective” husband to the tile-lapping cat to the punch-drunk neighbor.

The method? Heat an inch of clarified butter in a small saucepan to 170°F. Drop whisked, uniform egg yolks into butter using a caviar pipette, syringe, or even a careful hand and a small spoon. Keep the drops separate from one another in the butter, and after ten seconds or so once they’ve sufficiently hardened on the exterior, jostle them around a bit to prevent them from sticking to the pan. Once they rise to the top, scoop them out with a straining spoon and let them drip off in a strainer until you’re ready to use them.

I served these exactly as Grant Achatz describes in the Alinea cookbook, with asparagus buds, asparagus bubbles (made from juiced asparagus  foamed with lecithin), lemon puree, and lemon vinaigrette. Then I made them the next day and served them tossed in fresh pasta with a light lemon cream sauce. Then I made them the next day but they didn’t last until dinner because Bentley Danger and I greedily spooned them all out of the strainer and they were gone before I could drop them inside my baked fingerling potatoes. Today I’m going to try really hard to make them last until the potatoes pop out because I think it will be a perfect pairing. I guess what I’m saying is that they are sofa-king good you could eat them with anything. But really, you can’t go wrong with eggs and butter.

*PS- Voting for Project Food Blog Challenge #2- The Classics, is now open. If you thought my The Jetsons: Space Food entry was worthy of advancement, I’d appreciate your vote here.

*Quick preface: Project Food Blog has really brought out the best in bloggers. I have noticed so much camaraderie, generosity and championing of one another’s posts, I am floored. It has been brilliant to read raw words written by real people all across the blogosphere and to laugh, salivate and cringe alongside fellow food aficionados. We are a strong community which has the ability to effect great change in the world, and this is the first I’ve seen of all that energy channeled toward a common goal; consequently I’m giddy with excitement about what the future holds. Voting for this round starts 09.27.10- Hope you’ll think of me.

The goal? Tackle a classic dish from another culture. I have decided to present a culture both near and far to many of our hearts- that of space in the “future,” specifically, The Jetsons. The Jetsons culture is eerily similar to our own in many ways. The buildings are even constructed to resemble the Seattle Space Needle. The food is startlingly different though, since it comes in capsular form. Yes, pill food.  The goal of the challenge is to try and be as true to the actual representation of the culture as possible, so I have undertaken to prepare pills from one specific breakfast in The Jetsons movie.  In the scene, George has toast, eggs, bacon, marmalade, juice and coffee. I have created a coffee and cream capsule, a blood orange marmalade pod, a quail egg and bacon pill resting on a tablet of toast, and a sphere of hot butter.

Lest anyone posit that the Jetsons is not in fact a “culture,” allow me to explain. I believe, as bloggers, we have an obligation to infuse our words with meaning. This is why I try to weave a thoughtful undercurrent into every post, albeit disguised behind tawdry humor and cheap puns. By selecting a subject so seemingly-whimsical as The Jetsons and their galaxy, I can illustrate some similarities and differences inherent to all global cultures in a non-offensive way.

Take for example, sexism. The Jetsons utopia was an imagined fabrication of what life would be like late in the 21^st century in Orbit City as theorized by mid-20^th century cartoon writers.  The whole thing reeks of Mad Men-like sexism that, in the US at least, we are now comfortable enough to laugh at because we know it’s parody. And yet, even in this society sexism is a battle we have only just won. In many cultures the label “sexist” is a non-issue because social parameters that have been in place for centuries render it a moot point. Women do what they do in different given societies- carry water on their head, cook for an extended family of 30, or even marry more than one man (go matrilineal society!). Men do what they do- hunt, play bocce, or amass a coterie of wives.

Cultures have mores because they make sense in the society to which they pertain. What I love about our society (meaning Western culture in general) is that we are constantly challenging what is relevant. For example, we’re well into the 21^st century and most of us sentient beings have realized that love is something to be celebrated regardless if it’s between a woman and a man, a woman and a woman, or a man and a man. We’re still fighting that battle in court, but I’m proud to say I don’t personally know anyone who is mentally-challenged enough to see a problem there.

One final point on why the Jetsons is relevant as a culture as it pertains to food I’d like to address is that many sci-fi enthusiasts envisioned future food as capsular. This is an ALARMING state of affairs! Was food really so bad in the mid-20^th century that everyone from Willy Wonka to Michael J. Fox in Back to the Future resorted to eating foods that were mere shadows of themselves in imagined realms? For that reason I am elated that our love affair with food is once again impassioned.  I want to use my 40 acres (hold the mule, please) of web real estate to bring attention to the notion that I hope food remains just that, food, for a long time to come. Yes, many of us resort to energy bars and effervescent electrolytes when pressed for time, but hopefully we won’t get to the point where we’ll be smashing grass-fed filets into 1” cubes to shave a second off our day full of endlessly ephemeral tasks.

Encapsulating food and making it both look and taste good is hard. I am accustomed to churning big batches of ice cream, smoking 20 pounds of pork belly to make bacon, fabricating a whole duck and tossing it into a sous vide water bath, and extruding enough pasta to feed the Pitt-Jolie clan. In other words, I like to do things from scratch and sometimes they’re kind of “fancy” things that employ molecular gastronomy techniques, but almost always they are high-volume. Food pills are just the opposite, so it was tricky to come up with a way to make tiny parcels both look and taste good.

I thought for a few days about how to encapsulate everything and the first epiphany I had came from pondering eggs. Eggs are a perfect food; nutrient-rich, contained within a membrane- i.e. Mother Nature’s pills. I decided to work with the shape of the egg and thus came up with the bacon eggs and toast tablet. To make it, I sous vided a quail egg, rolled it in bacon, then baked the parcel so that the bacon shrink-wrapped the egg. I froze a baguette then thinly sliced it on a mandoline. Originally I planned to wrap the quail bacon pill with the baguette but it was much prettier without so I left it be aside from a quick jaunt under the broiler.

For the coffee and cream capsule I prepared two agar agar-based puddings, one espresso and one vanilla cream. I formed them by filling sheets of acetate taped into tubes, and then I froze them solid. For the butter sphere, I made molds of beurre monte mixed with calcium lactate and let it soak in a sodium alginate bath for half an hour. After my spheres formed sufficient skins, I removed them to a hot water bath. The effect of this is that while the butter forms an exterior skin, when you slather it on something it is unctuously-melted inside. The butter sphere served with the toast tablet made for quite a bite.

I combined the concept of juice and marmalade to make the blood orange marmalade pod. I started by candying some blood orange peels, but rather than caramelize them in sugar and water, I used blood orange juice. Once the syrup thickened, I molded it and turned it out after it had formed a solid pod.

After I photographed my encapsulated breakfast, I set about to eating it. Every pill was a distillment of its larger format self and therefore intriguing, delicious and novel. The biggest irony, however, is that it took days to create this meal when I could have rendered its current counterpart in mere minutes. Future food may save space, but it certainly didn’t save me any time. Wait- maybe that’s what the robots are for?

Image credit Hanna-Barbera via Universal Studios