Alinea's cookbook is impossible
Lara Kastner
Think you can make Alinea's candy cap, tough guy?
Last week, Decider took a first look at the new Alinea cookbook by renowned local chef and molecular gastronomist Grant Achatz. We promised to document our attempts to recreate the boy genius’ recipes garnered at his Lincoln Park restaurant. But, as it turns out, it isn’t exactly that easy. Here’s our first lesson in failure.
Standing in an aisle at Whole Foods, I declared defeat: You win, Grant Achatz. You are so brilliant that even your step-by-step guide explaining your brilliance is untouchable. You told me to find a list of ingredients, and even that I could not do. Instead, I found bottles promising “Glycemic Health,” a product designed to help pets “stop leakage,” and many a confused Whole Foods employee. But I hadn’t found the essential ingredients I needed to make smoked paprika taffy from your new Alinea cookbook.
The day had been a slow process of elimination. The early math looked something like this:
[Total recipes: 107]
- [recipes requiring things out of season]
27
- [recipes requiring things out of season]
27
But things went downhill from there. I balked at the first fall recipe because it would require going out and picking oak branches and then turning them into skewers. (I wasn’t sure where to find an oak tree or whether it is legal to pick branches off of city property.) The next recipe seemed doable until this instruction in the sub-recipe for banana froth: “Cover and let steep for two days.” Who has time for that? Next!
“Trout Roe.” I’d seen this ingredient before—oh, right, from the special/rare ingredients page. I flip back and skim the page to learn more. The trout roe comes from “spring-fed trout ponds in Michigan.” Eggs are “hand processed,” and... yes, here it is: “The production is low, around 60 pounds per year, and we have begun to buy up [Steve Sallard’s] entire harvest.” So, this recipe calls for an ingredient that can only be had should your name be Grant Achatz. I type “brook trout roe” into Google products: “Your search—‘brook trout roe’—did not match any products.” Next!
“Skim with ladle to remove any foam, and then, if necessary, flash surface with kitchen torch to remove any remaining bubbles.” Nope. No kitchen torch. The next few recipes rely heavily on dehydrators, vacuum-sealed pouches, and pro-level juicers and blenders—the kind that easily destroy iPods.
That brings me to this equation:
[27 seasonal recipes]
- [recipes requiring expensive/ridiculous equipment]
- [recipes requiring expensive/ridiculous ingredients]
Very, very few.
- [recipes requiring expensive/ridiculous equipment]
- [recipes requiring expensive/ridiculous ingredients]
Very, very few.
New plan. Cooking one of these recipes in its entirety was not a good idea; it’s a lesson in futility, masochism, and depreciation of self-worth. Instead, I finally settle on a recipe for something I believe could be eaten solo: a component of the Kuroge Wagyu (Japanese for some kind of fancy and probably delicious beef) recipe, smoked paprika taffy.
Look all you want: Isomalt isn't anywhere on these shelves.The barriers to success, aside from a general lack of prowess: glycerin, glucose, isomalt, and a juicer. After calling six people who didn’t own a juicer, I went to Target, which sells juicers. They’re expensive, but I pulled apart one of the display models to see how it worked. It looked kind of like a food mill, which I own. I would just take the bell peppers and blend them or something, and then pass it through the food mill, which, in theory, would get rid of the skins. I was willing to make this compromise with Achatz.
But then I called Whole Foods, which had glycerin but not glucose. If I could find everything but one ingredient, I was willing to go for it and fake a substitute (even though Achatz warns against this in the beginning of the book). When I asked the clerk about isomalt on the phone, spelling it several times, he said, “We don’t know about that here.” Sir, you are not alone.
I thought maybe GNC would know, since the Internet told me it was a natural sugar substitute from beets that sometimes diabetics use. The clerk walked me to the one sugar substitute they sold, which was neither glycerin nor glucose. I also checked out several local pharmacies, and then drove to Whole Foods, because, well, I thought, come on, isomalt is so seemingly normal that it doesn't even warrant a description in Achatz's dictionary in the beginning of the book. But no. I walked around, leaving a wake of flummoxed Whole Foods employees, got distracted by some free samples of chocolate chip poundcake, and decided to go home.
It's impossible... at least if you're shopping locally. But I've got contacts in a biochemistry department, an Internet connection, and a credit card. Stay tuned.
Total prep time: 5 hours
Total cooking time: 0 minutes
Total cooking time: 0 minutes
