Personal Cooking History

Subsiding on muesli and catered dorm food for years, something must have snapped when I moved into a share house. I started simply on Macaroons and then I started following The Alinea Project. The Alinea restaurant, run by Grant Achatz, is one of the world's best and heavily utilized modernist techniques. They released a cookbook, dealing all of the recipes served in the restaurant over the course of a single year. This has prompted several bloggers to 'cook the book', attempting all of the recipes. These include The Alinea Project and Alineaphile. Buying the book, a dehydrator and a package of special powders from Modernist Pantry, I made my foray into this world.

I don't intend for this blog to be dedicated to cooking the dishes of Alinea, as this has been comprehensibly covered in the Alinea Project with far better photographs than I might manage. The dishes I have cooked include

Spring:
Transparency of Manchego cheese

Summer:
Prosciutto passionfruit, zuta levanna
Dry shot, red pepper, garlic, oregano
Pineapple, bacon powder, black pepper
Salad, red wine vinaigrette

Autumn:
Chocolate, warmed to 94 degrees
Dry caramel, salt

Winter
Tuna, candied and dried
Lamb, mastic, date, rosemary fragrance
Pork belly, pickled vegetables, BBQ sugar, polenta
Caramel popcorn, liquefied.

There were made over two dinner parties and I will detail these meals in a separate post.These dinner parties were immensely hectic and the parts which I enjoyed the most were the dishes I developed myself and had to troubleshoot that way. As such, I am moving away from performing recipes in the Alinea book, towards more general culinary experimentation. This is guided by Dave Arnold at Cooking Issues, especially through listening to the Cooking Issues podcast from the Heritage Radio Network.

More recently, I have made Stretchy Potato Icecream, a DIY Immersion circulator (mashing up plans from here and here) and a slow-cooked and deep-fried all belly porchetta.