If all chefs thought like Homero Cantu, perhaps the next big food trend would be hay cookies or pine cone cake. If you know Cantu, the Michelin-star chef, also referred to as a mad scientist, of Chicago Moto-restaurant fame, you know that about anything is possible.
Just like the rest of the crowd, I hung on his every word a few weeks ago when he spoke at the American Culinary Federation (ACF) national convention in Kansas City. Perhaps you’ve heard of the drum he’s beating now—the miracle berry found in West Africa. If you eat one, it mysteriously binds to your taste receptors, blocking the ability to taste sour flavors. For a time after you eat the berry, any sour thing you eat tastes sweet. As it turns out, sour items usually are healthful, while the sugar-laced sweet things we pursue are not as healthful and are calorie-laden. Alas, on the table in front of us was a plastic cup with one of these “berries.” Actually, it was a pill. One berry is freeze-dried, bound with a little cornstarch and processed into three tablets. You let one dissolve on your tongue. I was game. The fairly flavorless tablet dissolved quickly. Also before each of us was a lemon wedge. After our tablets dissolved, he asked us to lick our lemon wedges. Walla! It tasted like lemonade. So much so that I sucked my lemon wedge dry.
He’s onto something, which of course, he knows. Last year Cantu published a book “The Miracle Berry Diet Cookbook.” The premise of that is, buy some miracle berries (I hear the tablets cost about $1.25 each!) and then eat anything you make from that cookbook and it will have some flavor different than the ingredients would suggest.
Otherwise, Cantu took us on a stroll down the “replicating” path. It was apparent that to accomplish many of his culinary feats you need to purchase an impact mill (a high-speed beater mill used to pulverize and micro-pulverize).
• He made a Cuban cigar-looking item edible by using a Cuban pork sandwich. He took spices in a pork sandwich, froze them in liquid nitrogen, whirled them in his impact mill, and with a little more hocus pocus, came up with a realistic replica. (It is covered in a collard green wrapper cooked in pork liquid.)
• He made a vegan burger out of items a cow eats (beets, corn, barley and hay). It involves extracting oil from corn, adding the oil back in, charring the corn, juicing the beets, cooking out the beet flavor, adding umami by burning beets and incorporating them back in, etc. He tested the burgers on unsuspecting subjects, and 40% thought it was a real burger.
• Though he’s not a fan of superfood drinks, he made ketchup out of a superfood drink. With a centrifuge, he separated the solid from the liquid, added tomato powder to the liquid, put it all back together again and ended up with ketchup with 2/3 less sugar than regular ketchup.
• Next it was fries to go with the ketchup. He made them out of granola bars that he put in the freeze dryer. He picked apart the 40 ingredients in the bars and put them in the impact mill, then compressed them into French-fry shapes with added water. He put them in the oven and spread a little olive oil on them, ending up with what looked like fries with the proper texture and density. He fed the new fries and ketchup to an unsuspecting group who had no idea they were eating anything other than the standard American fare.
But back to the West Africa miracle berry. In 1725, a French explorer went to West Africa and found 32 tribes in a particular area in which all but one tribe suffered from famine. That tribe was taking all they had, grass and hay, and fermenting them to break down the cell structure and making cookies, breads and cakes out of it. They simply ate the miracle berries growing in their area first, then the other items tasted fine.
Cantu summarized that the value of anything grown is in the flavor. “In the future, this foraging thing going on today has some legs to it. The problem with our encyclopedia of edible foraged stuff is that it’s not large enough. But what if we redesign it? What if we could replicate a French gâteau out of pine?” he asked. “I don’t know if that’s possible. What if we could do that and lower our carbon footprint and work with our permaculture and not our agriculture like that tribe did?”
Interesting thoughts he had. Tell me what you think.
Jody
