Genius Week 1: A Romaine-tic Salad

Simple, yet delightful

You might be thinking: "A salad? That's easy!" Well, you've got to start somewhere right? For Week 1, I made "Green Salad with Romaine Dressing" (from the Modernist Cuisine at Home cookbook), which was actually more difficult to make than it may seem. According to the cookbook, the salad should only have taken 1 hour, but I spent 2 hours just trying to make the dressing, which really took up the bulk of the time allotted for making the salad...

So far, I've learned that cooking is much, MUCH harder than it looks (and very time consuming, of course) and that I have a long way to go if I ever want to achieve "semi"-mastery. It's a very hands-on experience, almost like performing a science experiment except I eat what I make. Basically, my takeaway from Week 1 is my realization that I am a novice--at cooking--in every sense of the word (my parents also established this, since they were watching me "cooking"). This conclusion I have come to serves as the driving force behind my project: I will improve at cooking. I will not give up. In fact, I had a lot of fun making the salad this week and I'm looking forward to next week's dish and technique. Here is the timeline I know has been much awaited for (the dishes will not be revealed until my next blog posts):

Week 0: Intro to Modernist Cuisine
Week 1: Blanching

Week 2: Sous Vide

Week 3: Pressure Cook

Week 4: Pan-fry
Week 5: Create My Own Dish

My recipe for the salad is featured below. It is based on the recipe from the Modernist Cuisine at Home cookbook, although I did make a few modifications, such as...

• No eggs! - The original recipe called for sous vide eggs and I don't have my sous vide cooker yet
• No butter lettuce! - When I went food shopping, I could not find any butter lettuce (according to my parents, it is not in season), so I settled with green lettuce
• No tarragon leaves! - I had no idea what those were and where to buy them fresh, so I just left them out of my dressing
• No cheesecloth! - I drained the greens (used for the dressing) by squeezing them with my hand...so not pro, but I did what I had to do
• 1 anchovy fillet vs. 3! - The anchovies I got from Costco were super high in salt content, so I only added one anchovy to my dressing

Green Salad with Romaine Dressing                                                           ❦❦❦❦❦❦❦❦❦❦❦❦ ******************************************************************************************************** Set a pot of water to boil and put together an ice water bath. Weigh out 40g of Romaine Lettuce Leaves, 15g of Chives, 15g of Mint Leaves, and 5g of Basil Leaves. Place the greens (from above) into the boiling water for 1 minute, then place them in the ice bath immediately. After about 5 minutes, drain the leaves. In a blender, add 1/4 cup of Buttermilk, 1/3 cup of Parmigiano-Reggiano (Parmesan cheese), 1 Anchovy fillet, 3 tablespoons of Olive Oil, and your greens. Puree until your dressing is smooth. Add lemon juice and salt (to your taste). Slice lettuce and red radishes, the main components of your salad Add the dressing and toss.

The salad and dressing were actually pretty good. The dressing had a strong cheese taste and was, according to my parents, a bit too salty. This was because the anchovies--who would have ever thought to put anchovies in salad dressing?--I got from Costco were VERY high in salt content. This taught me that next time, whenever I'm using processed foods, I should always check the nutritional facts to ensure that it is not too high in fat, sugar, or salt. 

The Original Recipe pt. 2

The Original Recipe pt. 1

So what was the technique that I used? Well, it isn't modernist per se, but it is pretty cool in my opinion: blanching. This involves boiling--in this case--leafy greens and then immediately plunging them into ice water. According to the website listed below*, blanching is used to preserve food (since it breaks down bacteria that normally cause food to spoil and rot, and enzymes that change the color of food), remove flavors you don't want (certain veggies and meats have strong flavors, and can be blanched to make their flavors milder), and texture certain foods (ex. tomatoes can be blanched to soften their skins). For this week's salad dressing, I believe blanching was used for all of the above:

• Preservation: The Modernist Cuisine at Home cookbook mentioned that the dressing could last up to two days
• Removing flavors: Chives, mint, and basil all have somewhat strong flavors that were removed so that the dressing was light and simple
• Texture: All leafy greens were softened in the blanching process in order to ensure that they would be pureed smoothly

Here's the video of me making the salad:

Sequence of Events in the Video (every shot/scene is listed below):

1. Radishes soaking in water- I was washing them, along with the other veggies used in this salad
2. Peeling off romaine leaves
3. Measuring the leaves on my digital scale
4. Gathering mint leaves- we have a mint plant at my home, so I cut some mint leaves to use in my dressing
5. Setting a pot to boil (clearly, I didn't do things in the order I intended to do them in, as detailed in my recipe)
6. Adding a 1/3 cup of Parmesan cheese to my blender
7. Adding a 1/4 cup of buttermilk to my blender
8. Adding 1 anchovy fillet to my blender
9. Pouring water into what will be my ice bath
10. Boiling the greens (blanching process pt. 1)
11. Placing the greens in my ice bath (blanching process pt. 2)
12. Placing the greens in a colander to dry them
13. Placing the greens in the blender and pureeing (basically means "blending until smooth" in fancy kitchen speak) the dressing
14. Cutting a lemon and juicing it (to add to the dressing)
15. Slicing radishes
16. End product

My attempt at being food-artsy. Yay or nay?

Modernist Cuisine is all about advancing and improving the process of cooking using science and technology. This week, the most technology I used was a digital scale (as well as a stove of course). This may not seem like a big deal, but it was cool for me to start using a scale of my own. Next week will be much more exciting technology-wise, since I will be using a sous vide cooker!

As of now, I have been using the Modernist Cuisine at Home cookbook, since it encompasses every aspect of Modernist Cuisine. It has greatly helped me familiarize myself with the ideals behind Modernist Cuisine that serve as its foundation and the basics of cooking (food safety, neutral vs. flavorful oils, etc.). For the coming weeks, I believe this will be the main resource I will use. All of my recipes will most likely be coming from this book.

The main chef behind the Modernist Cuisine series is Nathan Myhrvold. He is quite a fascinating figure, and perhaps, my role model in science and cooking. Since he was young, Myhrvold always had a passion for cooking. He states in the Modernist Cuisine at Home book: "My interest in cooking was so strong that I might have become a chef, had my interest in other things--particularly math and science--not intervened." At the age of 14, Myhrvold started college. By the age of 23, he had a "Ph.D. in mathematical physics, a master's degree in economics, another master's degree in geophysics and space physics, and a bachlor's degree in mathematics" (Modernist Cuisine at Home xiv). Next, Myhrvold worked with Dr. Stephen Hawking at Cambridge University, and later, became Microsoft's first chief technology officer. After retiring from Microsoft at the age of 40 in 1999, he was "determined to spend more time in the kitchen" (Modernist Cuisine at Home xiv). And thus, a science and cooking genius was born. To read more about Nathan Myhrvold and Modernist Cuisine, visit this website.

If you don't have enough blogs to follow, check out the Modernist Cuisine blog. It features many cool dishes that the Modernist Cuisine kitchen has been working on. I found that they had made an amazing gingerbread house with many intricate details. It was very interesting to examine the process in which they made the gingerbread house; the technologies they used were very impressive. The video is shown below:

Ugh...why can't I do something like that?

Until next week ✌,
~A

Links/Resources:

• The Modernist Cuisine at Home cookbook; here's the Modernist Cuisine website
• Because the photography of Modernist Cuisine is pretty cool, check it out
• Blanching Technique*

My Comments:

• Allison
• Jess
• Nicole
• Hanna
• Lil

P.S. Strangely enough, after I finished writing this post, my sous vide cooker arrived (I guess you could say that today has been the epitome of the concept of "perfect timing"--esp. with the snow day and lots of homework piling up at my feet). Here it is, pictured below:

The ANova Precision Cooker feat. a fine-lookin' blender blade and a pestle in the background

To learn more about my new sous vide cooker, visit this website