The most beautiful grape in the world?

This grape may be the most beautiful in the world, don't you think? Like all things pink and pretty it's from Japan, and called Koshu. It's most often used, at least these days, to make dry white wines and the occasional bubbly, but historically it's been used to make sweet wine. Not available in Sweden unfortunately, I'd love to get ahold of some for the warm summer days I hope are coming.

(Image from google.com)

Research, the good and bad

Kim, the master street food chef that runs our Shack, posted this website to her Facebook page as something she found when researching future dishes to serve up street style for you. I's possibly the most paradoxical website on earth. Obviously made by someone who knew some HTML and web design back in the late -90s/early -00's, it's an eyesore. But boy is it full of good food!
It's strange that something that hurts can be so satisfying... (er)

Drop by the Shack soon to pick up Kim's version of Mexican street food.

When the label doesn't reflect the contents

The most expensive bottle I've ever opened was a 1952 Burgundy from a very high-end producer and worth a hefty six-figure sum. It was sublime, with all the depth and nuance you'd expect from a mature 60 year old.
But was it really 60 years old? Was it really a grand cru Burgundy from this specific producer? I couldn't tell you. Counterfeit wines (especially in this specific price group) is on the rise. It could have been a really good re-bottled négociant (Up until the -70s large producers in Burgundy would sell their output in bulk to so called négociants which would bottle and sell it under their own labels). I didn't check for the initials "RK" on the bottom of the bottle, but I sure as hell am going to pick that practice up.
See, the only people who can really know if an old, expensive bottle is the real deal are the producers themselves, and that's not by taste. Badly made fakes are of course easy for most of us to figure out, but the well made ones pull the wool over the eyes on even the most acclaimed experts. They can make an educated guess, of course, which is better than most people's gargling and spitting. However, one mostly has to rely on the producers themselves and their records of making, bottling and selling the wine. I remind you that this was before the internet generation and the FBI's division specializing on frauds concerning art. So the records are sketchy. After all, how difficult can it be to take an old, empty bottle and fit it with a fake label? Not too difficult, considering that some producers could't even spell their own names properly.

I guess it boils down to "is wine ever really worth these very large sums of money?". Let me put it this way: no.
To me, if I had a couple of millions to drop in the murky world of wine auctions then yes, I'd drop them right in there on a bottle once owned by the Shah of Iran. But if you drink wine like I do, you're much better off investing in selected bottles for those special occasions, and a couple of steady house wines. It saves you stress, or at least it saves me a lot of stress. To my mind, wine is one of those things that should never be spoiled by stress and anxiety. How do you judge whether the time is right to open your 1950's grand cru Burgundy? It's not like there's an unlimited supply should your date be bad.

Don't forget where you saw it first

Street food

What is street food? If you haven't been to any large and over-populated cities in Asia I daresay you might believe that street food is something you can get from a small shop which you enter from the street. Say, something that serves kimchi. Where you sit down and eat with a knife and fork, and maybe chopsticks if you're adventurous.
Duh.
Street food is about small stalls which pop up close to food markets. Street food is about fresh fresh fresh produce that's whipped up into something that you get in a bucket and eat as you go (with your hands!). Street food is about word of mouth, chasing down the best pavement chefs and getting some before it's gone.

We get that eating food out of a bucket might not be something that appeals to the general foodie public, so you do get a set of utensils when you order from The Shack. Otherwise, we're tapping into street food heritage with Kim, the super-taster from California (you know, the place sort of close to Mexico, a veritable street food Mecca). She cooks with inspiration from what she's grown up with and what she's tasted from her extensive travels, often making up and altering recipes from memory (some have photographic memory, others have the olfactory equivalent).

So what are you waiting for? More kimchi from a jar?

Serving up

(let them eat cake)

The "Clean and Simple"

We've seen and heard a lot of molecular gastronomy-haters since the "clean and simple" trend reared it's shaggy head (just like any other hipster it could do with a shave). Roaring "I like my carrots so fresh and untouched that they're still covered in dirt" and "no additives!!!", and beating their chests with the jagged marrow-bones from which they've just pulled out of a make-shift fire, only to suck the marrow dry, fat dripping down their au natural-styled beards. Ashes to ashes, dust to dust, food must be as unviolated by chefs as possible when it is served at the table. The produce must be RESPECTED for its pure and shining spirit, and chefs with their fingering and prodding are of the devil. Even if it means the spinach is unwashed.
Well, not quite. But you get my drift.

When all this has been going on I have truly wondered if any of these very vocal people have in fact ever visited a restaurant serving anything even close to the so hated and feared "molecular gastronomy". See, SVT recently ran a documentary about El Bulli. You can find it here. The focus is not so much on the day to day operations of the restaurant when it's open to customers, but rather the six months of the year during which it is closed to find and develop new dishes. As a scientist, I find their method meticulous. A product, say a carrot, is stripped down to it's bare essentials in search of the method which allows the flavor to be its sweetest, carrotiest best. It's liquidated, fried (oil and no oil) baked, broiled, sautéed, sous vide:d, dried, frozen and then all of these methods are pitted against each other just to make sure the flavor is not at its prime when it's been both baked and frozen. At all of the stages are the products tasted and photographed and a detailed log kept over both the method and the result.
Say they have been able to find a supplier of good carrots for the autumn. What to do with them? All the methods of cooking the carrots are explored until they, for example, decide on a carrot soup. Then the different methods of making carrot soup are explored until the right one is found. Then comes the question of what to serve with the carrot soup. Should it be drizzled with hazelnut oil or avocado oil? should it have a crunchy accompaniment? Which accompaniment? And the search starts all over. Then there's the quest for the right way to serve it. What bowls are the best? What spoons? What does the sommelier think?

I know of no other restaurant that makes that amount of effort to respect the produce. It's not as if the dishes are particularly complicated - it's one thing, or maybe two, with contrasting textures and maybe a contrast in temperature thrown in for fun. There aren't "additives" in the sense that the color is chemically enhanced - in fact, all the equipment, spices and techniques are things which I know you can pretty much find on Amazon. Salt, and other spices are added - if that's what you want to count as an additive.
Of course, if you booked a table at El Bulli you would have been served 40-odd courses. So yes, there would have been a lot of disparate ingredients - but not all on one plate, as some of the haters would like to make out.

The point I would like to make is that these days it's very hard to not do something that hasn't been done before (a problem the El Bulli chefs faced themselves), so pioneering a new type of cuisine is not something that happens every day. However, the techniques and methods developed by Adría and his team are something you can be sure almost every aspiring chef use on a regular basis. Even the ones claiming to serve those dirty carrots. Who was it that explored the difference in flavor to meat depending on when it is salted? Thats right. Someone interested in molecules.