Science and Food at UCLA with Chef Alex Atala
Professor Amy Rowat leads a popular undergraduate course titled “Science and Food: The Physical and Molecular Origins of What We Eat” for UCLA’s Life Sciences program. The class offers students the chance to learn the origins of food texture and flavor – i.e. why lettuce is crispy, or why different cuts of meat have different textures.
The class is punctuated with course lectures by highly regarded chefs and farmers from Los Angeles and beyond. This year, for example, Chef Jeremy Fox will be giving a class lecture entitled “The Art of Vegetable Texture” and Chef Michael Voltaggio will be lecturing on “Meat Texture and Elasticity.”
Accompanying the class each spring is an evening lecture series that is open to the general public. Similar to Harvard’s “Science and Cooking” lectures, this series is presented for nominal ticket prices with the intent of introducing food science to those outside of the program.
Just last week, Alex Atala, the chef and owner of D.O.M. in São Paulo, Brazil, kicked off the 2013 public lecture series with a discussion on the intersection of the primitive with the modern. Once described by Chef David Chang as more interesting than the Dos Equis Most Interesting Man in the Word, Atala is renowned for a devotion to regional cuisine using indigenous Brazilian ingredients.
Atala works closely with anthropologists and scientists to discover and classify new foods from the Amazonian region. Among his favorite discoveries are priprioca, a fragrant Amazonian root used in savory and sweet dishes, and a new variety of wild palm perfectly adapted for sustainable and environmentally sound farming, which he serves as fettuccine with butter, sage, and popcorn powder (see recipe below).
The lecture focused primarily on the chef’s creative process by leading attendees dish by dish through his vegetarian tasting menu. He likened the work of a chef to that of a trained animal by noting that conditioning and reflex can feel comfortable, but it can also hinder innovation. To break the conditioning of the day to day repetition of the restaurant kitchen, he leaves the restaurant each year to spend time searching out new foods in the Amazon.
Atala emphasized that innovation isn’t limited to new discovery or invention. It can also be found in the simple act of doing something in an unexpected way. For one of the dishes on the tasting menu, Atala uses manioc (yuca flour), a staple ingredient of peasant cooking in Brasil, and pairs it with a few local herbs and chili. It is a dish that would be right at home in a tribal village but had never before been served like this in a fine dining setting. To make the dish his own, to remind diners of the dish’s humble origin, and to draw a link to the burning of the Amazonian rain forest, Atala garnishes the dish with a few bitter drops of charcoal oil, made by infusing neutral cooking oil with the still glowing embers of burnt wood.
Referencing the charcoal oil, Atala noted that prep work does not start in the kitchen. It starts with conservation. He believes that humans must remain vigilant in their relationship with food and care deeply about sustainability. “My mise en place starts with protecting the land, the forests, and the sea,” he says.
The chef also spent time focused on “context” in cooking. Grilling steak over an open flame produces the Maillard reaction (when the denatured proteins on the surface of meat combine with the sugars present) resulting in that caramelized, meaty flavor and aroma. The same chemical reaction occurs when human remains are burned on a funeral pyre. Similarly, many expensive, aged cheeses, Atala noted, have the same smell as old sweaty shoes. For both examples, what is delicious and what seems revolting is a matter of context.
To bring home this point, Atala asked the audience if they would ever consider eating vomit. He then followed that with the question of whether they had eaten honey, which is the vomit of a honeybee. He described a woman he met in the Amazon who gave him a handful of dried ants. He was surprised to discover that the ants tasted of lemongrass, cardamom, and ginger. When he returned on another trip with real lemongrass, cardamom, and ginger, the woman responded that these aromatics tasted like ants. Context.
Later this week, Chef Alice Waters will be joined by Professor Wendy Slusser and Chef David Binkle in the second lecture, focusing on edible eduction and, in mid-May, Chefs Christina Tosi of Momofuku Milk Bar and Zoe Nathan of Huckleberry Bakery will discuss the science of pie. Tickets are still available for both lectures on the Science and Food Web site.
Heart of Palm Fettuccine with Butter and Sage, Parmesan Cheese and Popcorn Powder
Recipe by Alex Atala, D.O.M.
Serves 4
(Note that US weights are approximate. For more accurate results, use the original metric measurements.)
Canola oil
100 g (3 ½ oz) broken corn (quirera)
1 kg (2 ¼ lbs) heart of palm
10 ml (2 tsp) clarified butter
1 small zucchini
60 g (2 oz) unsalted butter
15 sage leaves
50 g (1 ¾ oz) Parmesan cheese, shaved into strips
Salt
1. To make the popcorn powder: Heat ½-inch of canola oil in a high sided, heavy bottomed pan until it reaches 180°C (355°F). Fry the broken corn in batches until it opens like popcorn. Remove with a slotted spoon and set it on a kitchen towel to cool. Pulse in a food processor until it turns to powder. Sieve twice and season with salt. Set aside.
2. For the fettuccine: Remove the heart of palm’s bark (if any). Cut the heart of palm in fine strips using a mandoline, so that it resembles fettuccine. Blanch the fettuccine strips in boiling salted water for one minute.
3. Cut the zucchini into thin rounds. Heat the clarified butter in a frying pan over high heat and sear one side of four separate rounds of zucchini. Carefully clean out the pan with a paper towel and then melt the unsalted butter over medium heat until it turns slightly brown and foamy (brown butter). Add the sage and then the blanched heart of palm and toss to combine. Taste for seasoning, adding salt if necessary.
4. Place a portion of the heart of palm fettuccine in the center of each plate. Put one seared zucchini round on one side of the fettuccine and a long shaving of Parmesan on the other. Garnish with the popcorn powder.
Photo Credit: Sergio Coimbra
