HB: I know! I suppose anything that can elicit excitement and plaudits in some form will, by nature, have the opposite effect on other people. I suppose that’s just the way the world works.
CH: I’ve always been curious, are there particular ingredients that you guys find work well with some of the new technologies or applications (like, say, anti-griddling, or mixing with hydrocolloids), and are there others that you’d never alter with chemicals or that you view as off-limits?
HB: There are some products, like gelling gums and some pectins, that are sensitive to salt and that behave differently when you’ve got a slightly acidic environment. You have to be careful when you add the salt because you might make it gel earlier than it needs to. So you’ve got to be careful of that sort of thing. Beyond that, you approach these technologies much in the same way as you’d approach, say, truffles—a white truffle is best raw and a black truffle can be cooked.
These technologies are a little bit daunting to people, and the multi-syllable words for things don’t help. But everything is full of chemicals—water is a chemical, salt is a chemical, sugar is a chemical. It’s just that we’re used to those names; we’re not used to phenolic compounds and disulfides of whatever. But for me it’s exactly the same approach.
GA: As far as ingredients go, from a chef’s perspective, you literally have to take any ingredient on a case-by-case basis, and when you’re conceptualizing a dish you have to decide what your objective is with the particular ingredient—whether it be a textural change or altering the flavor in some way. There are certain things that we simply, for whatever reason, don’t want to mess with, but I think pretty much everything is fair game.
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